Geoffrey Alan Hosking FBA FRHistS 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 at University College, London. Born in Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland, Hosking studied Russian at King's College, Cambridge, earning an MA, before studying Russian history at Moscow State University. He then studied European history at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, before earning a PhD in modern Russian history at Cambridge. 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. 

April 28th, 1942 in Troon (Age 82)