Professor Holmes was educated in the UK, and has a BA (Hons) in Russian and German; an MA in Soviet Government and Politics; and a PhD in Comparative Government from the University of Essex. As a doctoral student, he spent more than a year at the Free University of Berlin and Leningrad University. In recent years, he has been a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford; a Visiting Fellow at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford Universities; and a Visiting Professor at the European University Institute in Florence.

Leslie Holmes specializes in comparative communist and post-communist studies, and has published five books in this area - The Policy Process in Communist States (Sage, 1981); Politics in the Communist World (Oxford University Press, 1986); The End of Communist Power (Polity and Oxford University Press, 1993); Post-Communism (Polity and Duke University Press, 1997); and Post-Communist Democratization (co-authored with John Dryzek - Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has edited or co-edited a further 5 books, and published numerous book chapters and journal articles. His latest book, Rotten States: Corruption, Post-Communism and Neo-Liberalism is due to be published in late-2004 or early-2005. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Romanian, Serbian and Turkish.

In recent years, Prof. Holmes' particular focus has been on corruption in post-communist countries. In this context, he has been a consultant to both the World Bank and Transparency International.

In 2000, Prof. Holmes was elected President of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) for a five-year term. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1995. In addition to his post as Professor of Political Science, he is also Deputy Director of the University of Melbourne's Contemporary Europe Research Centre.