Robert D. English

Robert D. English (born 1958) is an American academic, author, historian, and international relations scholar who specializes in the history and politics of contemporary East Europe and Russia. He is currently an associate professor of International Foreign Policy and Defense Analysis at the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

Biography

Early life

Robert English was born in 1958. In 1980 he received a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Public Administration and Ph.D. in politics from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.^[1]

Career

He worked in the U.S. Department of Defense from 1982–86, before moving onto the U.S. Committee for National Security between 1986-88. He taught as an assistant professor at the Bologna Center in the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Relations before becoming assistant professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California.^[1]

As an author English wrote parts of Rebirth: A Political History of Europe Since World War II with Cyril E. Black, Jonathan E. Helmreich, and A. James McAdams in 1999. During 2000 he co-edited My Six Years With Gorbachev: Notes from a Diary with Jack F. Matlock, Jr. and Elizabeth Tucker, which is the account of Anatoly S. Chernyaev's time as an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev.^[1]

His most notable work is Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War, an intellectual history of the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and his 'New Thinking' in the USSR. The book first charts the origins and nature of 'Old Thinking'- which persisted in the traditional Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the Soviet Union- and goes on to chart the changes in society and of intellectual class during the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev eras.

Recognition

In 1996 English won the Harold D. Lasswell Prize from the American Political Science Association for the work that he later used to write Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War.

In 2001 he received the Marshal Shulman Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. In addition, he has received fellowships from- among others- the Institute for Advanced Studyl the Princeton Society of Fellows; the U.S. Fund for Peace; the International Research & Exchanges Board; the Ford Foundation, where he has a "'Dual Expertise Fellowship' in Soviet/East European and national security affairs".^[1]

Currently, English is working on a "book-length study" called Our Serbian Brethren: History, Myth, and the Politics of Russian National Identity. He is writing the entry for The Kosovo War in the next edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Politics. He is also contributing a chapter, entitled The Path(s) not Taken: Contingency and Counterfactual in Analysis of the Cold War's End in a book edited by William C. Wohlforth to be called Witnesses to the End of the Cold War: Oral History, Analysis, Debates.^[1]

References

1 2 3 4 5 Robert D. English's Biography on the University of Southern California Website