Biography
Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1946 to an English father, businessman Arthur Halliday, and an Irish mother, Rita (née Finigan), Halliday attended the Marist School, Dundalk (1950–1953) and Ampleforth College (1953–1963) before going up to The Queen's College, University of Oxford in 1964 to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), graduating in 1967, and then on to the School of Oriental and African Studies (1969–1969). His doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE), on the foreign relations of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, was awarded in 1985, 17 years after beginning it (Sale 2002). From 1973 to 1985, he was a fellow of the Transnational Institute Amsterdam and Washington. From 1969 to 1983, he served as a member of editorial board of the New Left Review.
In 1983, he took up a teaching position at the LSE and from 1985 to 2008 was Professor of International Relations there. After recovering from illness in 2002-3, he was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE in 2005, but in 2008 he retired and became an ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, in Barcelona where he intensely collaborated with the LSE Alumni Association Spain.
Halliday was also a columnist for openDemocracy and La Vanguardia. In 2002, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.
A committed linguist, and advocate of the centrality of language to understanding contemporary globalisation, Halliday was competent in twelve languages, including Latin, Greek, Catalan, Persian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, and English. From 1965, he travelled widely in the Middle East, visiting every country from Afghanistan to Morocco, and giving lectures in most. He met and interviewed several key Islamic fighters, rebels, and religious leaders and politicians over the years.
Fred Halliday was highly skeptical of the cooperative projects planned between LSE and the Gaddafi Foundation, the charitable foundation led by Saif al-Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. Halliday's views were expressed in a "Note of Dissent" addressed to the LSE Council on 4 October 2009.
Read more about this topic: Fred Halliday
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