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In association with the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. At St Antony's, he also directs the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom. He is the author of ten books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ including The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name, Facts are Subversive and Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. He writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals. Awards he has received for his writing include the Somerset Maugham Award, Prix Européen de l'Essai and George Orwell Prize. In May 2017  he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen.

Margaret MacMillan is emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Professor of International History and the former Warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988, 2007); Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2001) (Peacemakers in the UK) for which she was the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize; Nixon in China: Six Days that Changed the World (Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao in the UK); The Uses and Abuses of History (2008); Extraordinary Canadians: Stephen Leacock (2009); The War that Ended Peace (2014). Her most recent book is War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020) which was a New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Geographical Society of Canada, Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and of the Learned Society of Wales, Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto, Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, St Hilda’s College and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Margaret is also a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum.

Gwendolyn Sasse has been the Director of ZOiS since October 2016. Since April 2021, she has been Einstein Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism at the Department of Social Sciences of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Prior to that, she was Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations and at the Oxford School for Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. She maintains her connection with Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the think tank Carnegie Europe. Her academic career began with the study of history, Slavonic studies and political science at the University of Hamburg and led her to an MSc and PhD in political science at the London School of Economics. After that, she took up a post as Assistant Professor at the Central European University, and then as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics before moving to Oxford in 2007 where she became a full professor in 2013.

Peter Wittig joined the Foreign Service in the 1980s where he served in numerous assignments in conflict regions in Europe, the Middle East and in multilateral diplomacy. From 2009 to 2014 he represented Germany at the United Nations in New York, including two years on the Security Council, the highest body in world politics. He then moved to Washington as ambassador, where he represented German interests during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Protectionism, trade conflicts and sanctions laws became a focus of his work there. In 2018, he was sent to London as ambassador – under the sign of Brexit, the most important crisis post in Europe.