School of International Studies

We invite all IRAS Students to participate in our first Guest Lecture in the new academic year which will be delivered by Professor Archie Brown (Oxford) on 23 October 2014 at 2 p.m. in Collegium Maius

Professor Archie Brown, CMG, FBA

After teaching for thirty-four years at St Antony's College, Archie Brown became Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's from 1 October 2005. He continues to pursue an active programme of research and writing. Professor Brown was University Lecturer in Soviet Institutions from 1971 until 1989, and from 1989 to 2005 Professor of Politics. He was Sub-Warden of St Antony's College, 1995-97, and Director of the Russian and East European Centre (as it was then called), 1991-94 and 1998-2001. He was Director of Graduate Studies in Politics for the University from 2001 to 2003.

After studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science as undergraduate and graduate student, Archie Brown taught at Glasgow University from 1964 to 1971. During the 1967-68 academic year he was a British Council exchange scholar at Moscow State University. He has been Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale; the University of Connecticut; Columbia University; and the University of Texas at Austin as holder of the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Chair of Government. In the Fall semester of 1998 he was Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Professor Brown was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991 and was Chair of the Academy's Political Studies Section, 1999-2002. In 2014 he became a member of the Council of the British Academy. He was chosen as a founding academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 1999 and in 2003 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 he was awarded a CMG in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 'for services to UK-Russian relations and to the study of political science and international affairs'. He received one of the three Diamond Jubilee Lifetime Achievement in Political Studies Awards announced by the Political Studies Association in November 2010 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the association's foundation.

Archie Brown's latest book, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (published by Bodley Head in London and Basic Books in New York in April 2014) is his nineteenth, whether, as in this case, as sole author or as editor and part-author. His other books include (as co-editor with Michael Kaser and Gerald S. Smith) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 1994); The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback 1997; German translation, 2000; Japanese translation, 2008); The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (co-edited with Jack Hayward and Brian Barry, Oxford University Press, 1999; paperback, 2008); Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (editor, Oxford University Press paperback, 2001); Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition (co-editor with Lilia Shevtsova, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace paperback, Washington, DC, 2001); The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, St Antony's series, paperback, 2004); Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback, 2008; Chinese translation, 2009); and The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, and Ecco, New York, 2009; Vintage paperback, 2010).  The Gorbachev Factor and The Rise and Fall of Communism were each awarded two prizes – the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize from the Political Studies Association of the UK for best politics book of the year and the Alec Nove Prize of BASEES for best book on Russia, Communism or post-Communism. The Rise and Fall of Communism has been published in translation in Brazil, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal and, most recently, in Russia (by Rosspen in Moscow in 2014).

Brown's principal research interests are the Gorbachev era, the evolution and dissolution of Communism, the comparative study of political leadership, political culture, the Cold War, democratization, and national identity.