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. He was chosen as a founding academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the 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 also 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.

As author or as editor and co-author, Archie Brown has published eighteen books, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (co-edited with Michael Kaser and Gerald S. Smith). His book, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, 1996; paperback, 1997), won the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize from the Political Studies Association of the U.K. for the best political science book of its year and shared the Alec Nove Prize, awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), for best book or article in any discipline on Russia, Communism or Postcommunism. Professor Brown's most recent books are (as co-editor with Jack Hayward and Brian Barry) The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999; paperback, 2003); (as editor) Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (Oxford University Press, paperback, 2001); (as co-editor with Lilia Shevtsova) Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace paperback, 2001); (as editor) The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (Palgrave/St Antony's series paperback, 2004); Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback 2008); and The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, 2009; Vintage paperback, 2010). That last book was awarded the 2010 W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book of the year and the Nove Prize from BASEES. It has been translated into German, Dutch, Portuguese and Czech, and is currently being translated into Japanese, Hebrew, Estonian, and Russian.

Brown's principal research interests are the Gorbachev era, the evolution and dissolution of Communism, the comparative study of political leadership (on which he is currently writing a book), political culture, the Cold War, and democratization.

Email: archie.brown@sant.ox.ac.uk