Thomas Goltz 
Visiting Scholar of Geography
Office: Social Science Building 206
Office Phone: (406) 243-4136
Office Fax: (406) 243-4840
E-mail: goltz@wtp.net
Website: www.thomasgoltz.com
Education:
M.A. New York University, 1985
Middle Eastern Studies
B.A. New York University, 1980
Arabic and German Literature (Brecht)
Areas of Specialization:
Turkey and the Middle East
The former Soviet Caucasus
(Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Chechnya)
Current Course Offerings:
GEOG 495: Introduction to Post Soviet Caucasus
Personal Background Information:
Thomas Goltz has written news, features and OpEds for most leading US publications, ranging from the New York Times, Los Angles Times, Wall Street Journal and, Washington Post to The Nation on the Left and even Soldier of Fortune on the Right. His Azerbaijan Diary (M.E. Sharpe 1998/99) has been hailed as ‘essential reading for all post-Sovietologists.’ The second book in his post-Soviet triptych on the Caucasus was Chechnya Diary, published by St Martin’s Press/Tom Dunne in September 2003. The third and last book in the series is Georgia Diary, also published by M.E. Sharpe in May 2006. A memoir about his days as an itinerate actor in Africa in the late 1970s will be issued as Assassinating Shakespeare, by Saqi Books, London in 2006. A graduate with an MA in Middle East Studies from New York University in 1985, Goltz is fluent or functional in German, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Russian and Arabic.
He has worked as a lecturer on the Caucasus region at leading universities including Berkeley, Chicago, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Kentucky, London School of Economics, Michigan, Montana, Northwestern, Princeton, Oxford, Kentucky, Tulsa, Washington and Wisconsin; CIA, Department of Defense, US Air Force Special Forces academy and US State Department School as well as speaker at over 20 chapters of American Committees on Foreign Relations and World Affairs Councils throughout the USA.
In 2005 he was appointed Visiting Scholar in the newly created Central and Southwest Asia Studies Program at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he is currently teaching a class on the post-Soviet Caucasus through the Geography Department. Born in Japan in 1954, he grew up in the US state of North Dakota, and has been a Montana resident since 1978.
Selected Publications:
2006 Assassinating Shakespeare (Saqi Books, London)
2006 Georgia Diary (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk NY)
2003 Chechnya Diary (St Martins/Tom Dunne)
2000 ‘Remembering a Winter of Discontent,’ Washington Quarterly, Summer
1999 'An Anti-ethnic Diatribe,' Washington Quarterly, Fall
1999 'Baku Boom Gone Bust,' Washington Quarterly, Summer
1998 Azerbaijan Diary, (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk NY)
1997 'Catch 907 in the Caucasus,’ National Interest, Summer
1993 'Russia’s Hidden Hand,’ Foreign Policy, Fall
