BIOGRAPHY

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Born in Japan in 1954, Thomas Goltz was raised in Fargo, North Dakota before setting off to learn about the world at age eighteen. After an initial career as an actor and playwright in Chicago, New York (and a two year stint as a one-man Shakespearean street show in Africa), he turned his attention to the study of foreign languages and history, graduating from New York University with a BA focused on German and Arabic in 1981, and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies in 1985. His advisor was Dr David King, a specialist in Islamic science. For work-study, Goltz also translated two books by the leading German Orientalist and Geographer Prof. Dr. Eugen Wirth: Die Orientalische Stadt, and Zum Problem des Bazaars.
      Even before completing his MA, Goltz had based himself in Istanbul as a freelance foreign correspondent, writing for agencies such as United Press International and the Pacific News Service as well as newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post. During this period, his arc of journalistic activity began to include occasional reporting from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Germany, Iraq, Jordan, Sudan and Syria. He was also the text and picture editor of two travel guides in the Singapore-based APA series: Insight Guide: Turkey, and City Guide: Istanbul.
     In late 1990, Goltz received a two year fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA) to explore the Turkic-speaking republics of (then) Soviet Central Asia. But no sooner had he set up shop in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, than the Soviet Union collapsed. Unilaterally moving his fellowship to Baku, Azerbaijan, he began his fifteen-year association with the Caucasus—and found himself increasingly defined as a ‘war correspondent’ due to the nature of reporting from a region lurching into ethnic and national strife: coups and counter-coups and the ‘little’ wars over Karabakh (in Azerbaijan), Abkhazia (in Georgia) and Chechnya (in Russia) were all part of his ‘beat.’
     In addition to writing news and features for the New York Times, (London) Sunday Times and other news outlets, Goltz began writing analytical pieces for periodicals such as Foreign Affairs, The National Interest and The Washington Quarterly. (See Articles) He also began shooting and producing video-documentaries for PBS and the BBC, becoming a finalist for the Rory Peck Prize in 1996. (See Video Documentaries)
     By 1997, Goltz had begun writing what was eventually to become his ‘Caucasus Trilogy’ of books. The first was Azerbaijan Diary, published by M.E. Sharpe in 1998, which was and quickly declared ‘essential reading for all post-Sovietologists.’ Next came Chechnya Diary, published by St Martin’s/Tom Dunne in 2003. The third part of the triptych was Georgia Diary, published by M.E. Sharpe in 2006. The year 2006 also saw the publication of Assassinating Shakespeare, his Africa memoirs, by Saqi Books, that had been first drafted some thirty years before,. (See Books)
     Two other book projects and one related film are currently in the works: a book of idiosyncratic essays from St. Lucia to Syria, tentatively entitled ‘Fargo, Farewell,’ and a book/documentary film about the mad-cap circus Goltz organized down the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline in the year 2000, when he and his team delivered the first symbolic barrel of Caspian crude to the Mediterranean aboard Soviet-era BMW-knock-off, side-car motorcycles under the working rubric ‘Who Says Geo-politics Can’t Be Fun?’ The documentary is tentatively entitled ‘Oil Odyssey.’ (See Future Projects)
     Although he has lectured at virtually every major university and foreign-policy institute in the United States on a periodic basis over the years, Goltz’s return to academia after a twenty year hiatus came in 2006, when he was appointed a Visiting Scholar at the recently established Central and Southwest Asia Studies Program at the University of Montana in beautiful Missoula. since his appointment, he has developed 400-level courseS on the post-Soviet Caucasus AND Turkey, and taught a 200-level course on the modern middle east and been invited to participate in the creation of a new textbook on Central Asia and the Caucasus for undergraduate students of geography across the United States. (See Academic Activities)