Garton Ash to Give Elliot Lecture on September 26

Professor Timothy Garton Ash will deliver the Ralph Gregory Elliot First Amendment Lecture on September 26, 2016, at 4:30 p.m., in the Faculty Lounge. His talk is titled “Unilateral Universalism? The United States and the Promotion of Free Speech in a Connected World.”

Garton Ash will draw from his new book, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. “The United States has the strongest constitutionally anchored free speech tradition in the world, the most far-reaching internet platforms in the world, and a habit of promoting its values abroad,” said Garton Ash. “Yet this promotion faces substantial and arguably growing political, social and cultural resistance, not only from authoritarian, non-Western powers, in the name of cultural difference and ‘information sovereignty,’ but also from some Western and democratic societies, in the name of privacy, limiting hate speech or even a ‘right to be forgotten.’” The lecture will explore why this is the case and what role the U.S. should have in the global promotion of free speech.

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. He is the author of nine books including The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name, and Facts are Subversive. He writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, among other journals. He leads the thirteen-language Oxford University research project Freespeechdebate.com.

The Ralph Gregory Elliot First Amendment Lectureship, funded by a gift from Ralph Gregory Elliot ’61, provides for lectures, preferably on an annual basis, on some aspect of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.