Thomas W. Simons Jr.
AM ’59, PhD ’63; Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Thomas W. Simons, Jr., is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He holds a BA from Yale and an MA and PhD from Harvard, and has taught at Brown, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He did his Harvard PhD research in Vienna, and during a 35-year U.S. Foreign Service career, he specialized in East-West relations, and knows Danubian Europe well: Tom served as No. 2 in our Bucharest Embassy (1975-77), and he was the State Department’s workhorse policy officer for all of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia (1986-89); he and wife Peggy led an alumni group through Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. We will be visiting sites of triumph and tragedy in Europe’s most diverse region, and in his lectures he will be examining the perils (but also the glories) of that diversity.