Professor John Keane holds a Chair of Politics at the Centre of the Study of Democracy (Westminster University), which he found in 1989, and is a Research Professor at the Berlin Centre for Social-Science Inquiry, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He is considered one of Britain’s leading political thinkers and was recently described by the Australian Broadcasting Commission as ‘one of the great intellectual exports from Australia’. Among his 17 books and edited collections areThe Media and Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1991), the award-winning Tom Paine: A Political Life(London 1995), Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions(Oxford 1998), and Violence and Democracy (Cambridge 2004).

His latest book, due to be published in 2009, The Life and Death of Democracy, is the first comprehensive survey of democratic ideas and institutions for over a century.