About the Department

Thomas W. Simons, Jr. is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and teaches Government 1209, Post-Communist Islam, as a Lecturer.  He holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, all in history, and his early interest in West and Central European history has shifted toward Europe’s East and the Islamic world.  During a 35-year U.S. Foreign Service career, he specialized in East-West relations, serving in Poland, the USSR, and Romania, and working many years on the area in Washington.  During the 1990s Simons was U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union, and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan.  After retirement in 1998, he taught three years at Stanford, offering courses in the International System since 1914, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan in the 20th Century, and Varieties of Islamic Revival since 1870.  Since returning to Harvard he has been Director of the Program on Eurasia in Transition at the Davis Center (2002-2005) and also Provost’s Visiting Professor at Cornell (2005-2007), and has taught GOV 1209, on the situations of Muslims in the post-Soviet space and the Balkans, since 2007.  Simons is the
author of some four dozen articles on Central and East European history and politics and U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe and the Subcontinent, and four books: The End of the Cold War? (A first history of East-West relations in the 1980s, 1990), Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (a brief history of the area under Communism, 2nd rev. ed., 1993) (both from St. Martin’s), Islam in a Globalizing World (a synoptic account of Islam in society from the beginning till our times, Stanford, 2008), and now Eurasia’s New Frontiers. Young States,
Old Societies, Open Futures (an analysis of the main developments in the post-Soviet space and how the U.S. should approach it, Cornell, 2008).  He lives with his wife in Cambridge.