Thomas Goltz

Author, academic and adventurer Thomas Goltz is a graduate with an MA in Middle East Studies from New York University (1985), and is currently an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montana State University, Bozeman, where he teaches courses on the Post-Soviet Caucasus and the Middle East. Prior to returning to academia, Goltz spent some twenty years in the field as a print and electronic journalist. He has written news, features and OpEds for most leading US publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angles Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Extended pieces have appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Washington Quarterly and other large-format magazines. In terms of electronic media, he has worked for or produced video documentaries on a range of subjects for ABC/Nightline, BBC/Correspondent and CBS/60 Minutes. His 1998 book Azerbaijan Diary has been hailed as ‘essential reading for all post-Sovietologists;’ chapters have been published in French, German, Norwegian, Turkish and Persian, and its full publication in Azerbaijani is anticipated in 2011. The second book in his post-Soviet triptych on the Caucasus, Chechnya Diary, appeared in 2003; it was published in Turkish in 2005. The third book in the ‘unanticipated triptych’ is Georgia Diary, first published in hardback in 2006, and re-issued with an extended update as paperback in 2009. A memoir about Africa in the 1970s, Assassinating Shakespeare, was published issued as in May 2006, and published in Hungarian in 2007. Both Azerbaijan Diary and Georgia Diary have won accolades on the www.fivebestbooks.com web site. In 2012, he Kindlized Assassinating Shakespeare. This was followed by a Kindle version Sumgayit: An Armenian Agitator and the Beginning of the Collapse of the USSR, a book he edited for Aslan Ismayilov, the leading Azerbaijani Prosecutor in the weird show-trial of seven murderous thugs involved in the notorious events of February, 1988 in the then Soviet Azerbaijani city of Sumgayit. Most recently, he also Kindlized the long-awaited account of The Oil Odyssey, a bizarre motorcycle trip aboard Soviet-era three-wheelers down the 1500-mile proposed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, leading from Azerbaijan across Georgia and into Turkey. Goltz is fluent or functional in German, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Russian and Arabic, and has lectured at most leading US universities (Columbia, Georgetown, Berkeley, Northwestern, Princeton, etc) and foreign policy-related institutes in Azerbaijan, Canada, Georgia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Born in Japan in 1954, he grew up in North Dakota, and now lives in Montana. He is currently working on a three part series on independent Azerbaijan.