The guest speaker of the Maurice Fraser Annual Lecture 2024 is Timothy Garton Ash. Under the title of Europe at the Beginning of a New Era he will be discussing his latest book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. 

In it, Timothy Garton Ash argued that there was a distinct ‘post-Wall’ era of European history which began on 9 November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ended on 24 February 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If that is true, what are the defining characteristics of the new era? And what the key challenges that follow for Europe in this period? For a conventional historian 'It's too soon to say’, but for a ‘historian of the present’, and even more for European policy makers, some tentative answers must be attempted.

Meet out speaker and chair

Timothy Garton Ash (@fromTGA) is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow Emeritus at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eleven books of contemporary history and political writing which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. He also 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, among other journals. 

Simon Glendinning (@lonanglo) is Head of the European Institute and Professor in European Philosophy at LSE. His current research interests include the question of European identity. He is the author of Europe: A Philosophical History – Beyond Modernity.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.