Geoffrey Hawthorn

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Geoffrey Hawthorn (28 February 1941 – 31 December 2015) was a British professor of International Politics and Social and Political Theory. He led the Department of Political Sciences and International Politics at the University of Cambridge and later became an emeritus professor. He studied at Jesus College, Oxford (BA) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (MA).

He began his career as a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex (1964–1970). In 1970 he joined Cambridge, where he was a lecturer in sociology (1970–1985); a reader in Sociology and Politics (1985–1998); and a professor of International Politics (1998–2007). He was a fellow at Churchill College (1970–1976) and at Clare Hall (since 1982). He also lectured as a visiting professor of sociology at Harvard (1973–1974 and 1989–1990) and was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1989–1990). From 2007 he was an emeritus professor at Cambridge.

Stefan Collini, in Hawthorn’s obituary in The Guardian, said Hawthorn helped Cambridge build a strong Department of Politics and International Studies. Hawthorn served on the editorial board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He was known for his ideas on counterfactual history and wrote many papers for journals and other publications. In 1998 he delivered the British Academy’s Master-Mind Lecture. Cambridge’s Department of Political Sciences and International Politics established the Geoffrey Hawthorn Prize in his memory, awarded to the student with the highest average on a graduate paper.