Sir Noel Malcolm receives honorary degree from Harvard
Sir Noel Malcolm, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College in History, has today been awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws at Harvard University.
Citation from The Harvard Gazette:
"Among the powers — and responsibilities — of the press are its duty to disseminate accurate information and its role as a watchdog, checking the actions of every branch of government and holding them accountable. It is perhaps then in his position as political columnist and foreign editor of Spectator magazine from 1987-1992 that Sir Noel Malcolm made his greatest mark.
Albin Kurti certainly thought so. The longtime Kosovar politician and current prime minister said that when the Balkan war started in the late 1990s, Malcom — Margaret Thatcher’s adviser on the Balkans in that time, president of the Anglo-Albanian Association, a member of the Academies of Sciences of Albania and Kosovo, and then at Harvard — was a crucial voice.
“At the outset of the war in Kosova in 1998, he published the most important international historical account of the country,” Kurti said. “His work was timely, as propaganda was being used to justify genocide, and it documented the systemic discrimination of Albanians.
“He set the record straight at a moment when distorted history was being weaponized, so that the truth of the past could shape a more just future.”
There is no doubt Malcolm knows the truth of the past. He studied history and English literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, England, and was a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, also in Cambridge. In 1999 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard, and he gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford and the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge in 2001 and 2012, respectively. He has been a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, since 2002.
His notable books include the definitive “Bosnia: A Short History” and “Kosovo: A Short History,” which challenged nationalist myths in the Balkans; the “Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes”; the intellectual histories “Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750” and “Agents of Empire,” which focused on Venetian-Albanian relations; and “Human Rights and Political Wrongs,” in which he wrote that human rights “are concerned not with everything that is morally important, but rather with essential limits on the use of state power.”
A fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, at Cambridge he is an honorary fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius.
The late Queen Elizabeth II knighted Malcolm in 2014 in recognition of his work in scholarship, journalism, and European history."
The Harvard Gazette, Lucia Huntington, May 28, 2026
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/05/five-recognized-with-honorary-degrees/
Photo: Pharos Foundation
