Geoffrey Hosking
British historian
Geoffrey Alan Hosking (born 28 April 1942) is a British historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and formerly Leverhulme Research Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College, London. He also co-founded Nightline.
Education
Born in Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland, Hosking attended Maidstone Grammar School in Kent and studied Russian at King's College, Cambridge, earning an MA, before going on to further study of Russian history at Moscow State University. He then studied European history at St. Antony's College, Oxford, before earning a PhD in modern Russian history at Cambridge.
Career
He taught at the University of Essex as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and then Reader from 1966 to 1984, before joining SSEES, where he held the established chair of Russian History from 1984 to 2007. He also held a Leverhulme Research Professorship in Russian History at SSEES from 1999 to 2004.
He has been a visiting lecturer in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a research fellow at Columbia University's Russian Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Cologne.
Hosking presented the BBC Reith Lectures in 1988. His aim was to explain the dramatic changes of the Mikhail Gorbachev era in their historical context.
The public source identifies “Geoffrey Hosking” as british historian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Geoffrey, Hosking and British.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4500259. VIAF identifies the subject as 27094225. The Library of Congress control number is n79021542. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1966, 1984 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Geoffrey Hosking” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.