Archie Brown
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Archie Brown is a British academic and historian. From 2005, he became Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, where he was a Professor of Politics and Director of St. Anthony's Russian and East European Centre. He has also been the Chair of the Political Studies Section of the British Academy from 1999 to 2002.
Brown studied at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He would teach at Glasgow University from 1964 to 1971, during which time he was a British Council exchange scholar at Moscow State University for a year between 1967 and 1968[1].
He has been Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale University, the University of Connecticut and Columbia University. At the University of Texas, he was also a Visiting Professor, as well as a holder of the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Chair of Government. In addition, he spent the Autumn of 1998 as the Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame[1].
At Oxford University, Brown was University Lecturer in Soviet Institutions from 1971 until 1989. He became a Professor of Politics, working in this position from 1989 to 2005. Meanwhile, he was a Sub-Warden of St Antony's College between 1995 and 1997 and Director of the re-named Russian and East European Centre twice (from 1991 to 1994, and again from 1998 to 2001; he was also Acting Director for briefly in Michaelmas Term 2004). He was Director of Graduate Studies in Politics for the entire University faculty between 2001 to 2003[1].
Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991, Brown would go on to Chair the Academy's Political Studies Section from 1999 to 2002. Between 1999 and 2003, he was chosen as a founding academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, before being elected elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He was became a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2005 "for services to UK-Russian relations and to the study of political science and international affairs"[1].
Brown has written a number of books on the decline of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism, as well as contemporary Russian and British politics. His most famous work is The Gorbachev Factor, a history of Mikhail Gorbachev's role in the end of the Cold War, the reforms of Soviet Communism and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. He stresses that his work is not a biography and he treats Gorbachev as an objective 'factor' in the events of the late 1980s. The book examines the evolution of Gorbachev's 'New Thinking', his transition into power and the subsequent economic, political and international reforms he initiated, before examining his attempts to deal with nationalism within the Soviet Union, the August Coup and the collapse of the USSR itself[2]. Drawing on extensive primary and secondary sources, The Gorbachev Factor has received widespread critical acclaim and recommendations by fellow academics; it has also 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 from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies for the "best book or article in any discipline on Russia, Communism or Postcommunism"[1].
His next book will be Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective and is set to be published in 2006 by the Oxford University Press[1].
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f Archie Brown's St. Anthony's College Biography
- ^ Brown, A., The Gorbachev Factor, 1997 (Oxford University Press)
[edit] Bibliography
- Brown, A., Kaser, M., The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Khrushchev, 1977 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Gray, J., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, 1979 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Kaser, M., Soviet Policy for the 1980s, 1982 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Kaser, M., Smith, G. S., Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia, 1982 (Cambridge University Press)
- Brown, A., Political Culture and Communist Studies, 1985 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Political Leadership in the Soviet Union, 1989 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Biographical Dictionary of the Soviet Union, 1990 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
- Brown, A., New Thinking in Soviet Politics, 1992 (Palgrave Macmillan)
- Brown, A., Grachev, A., Milne, M., Final Days: Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1995 (Westview Press Inc., U.S.)
- Brown, A., The Gorbachev Factor, 1997 (Oxford University Press)
- Brown, A., Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, 2001 (Oxford University Press)
- Brown, A., Shevtsova, L. (eds), Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition, 2001 (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
- Barry, B., Brown, A., Hayward, J. (eds), The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, 2003 (Oxford University Press)
- Brown, A. (ed), The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia, 2004 (Palgrave)
Categories: Fellows of St Antony's College, Oxford | People associated with the University of Oxford | Alumni of the London School of Economics | Companions of the Order of St Michael and St George | American Academy of Arts and Sciences | Cold War historians | Historians of Russia | British historians | Historians | Living people
