Background

John Brewer was born on the 22nd of March, 1947 in Liverpool, United Kingdom. He is the child of dealers of antiquities.

Education

John Brewer attended Cambridge University and in 1968 he received a Bachelor's degree with honors, in 1972 a Master's degree, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1973.

John received an Honorary Master's degree from Harvard University in 1980.

Career

Brewer began his academic career in 1972, becoming a visiting professor at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973 he shifted to Cambridge University as an assistant lecturer in history, а position he held for three years. Then John was appointed an associate professor of history at Yale University, New Haven. In 1980 he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he served as a professor of history and literature at Harvard University till 1987. The same year he took the post of director of Clark Library and director of Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1987 to 1991, he also served as a professor of history in 1987-94 and as a Clark lecturer in 1977.

In 1993 he moved to Florence, Italy where he was a professor of cultural history at the European University Institute till 1999. When he came back to USA he served as John and Marion Sullivan Professor in English and History at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois in 1999-2000. Brewer became a Moore Distinguished Visitor at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena in 2001, and a professor of history and literature in 2002. In 2009 he was a Ford Lecturer at the University of Oxford and in 2010 he was appointed a visiting fellow at the University of Munich. After that in 2011, he was a visiting professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale in Paris and a visiting research associate at Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. From January to March of 2016 he was a Fellow at Ustinov College, Durham University.

John has acted as a consultant at the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Institute for the Arts in Detroit, Bard Graduate Center in the Decorative Arts, and at Colonial Williamsburg.

Brewer is the author or editor of fifteen books, translated into seven different languages, including “The Sinews of Power. War Money and the English State” in 1989, and “Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the 18th Century” in 1996. His published work is wide-ranging, dealing with politics and culture, state formation, finance and bureaucracy, the history of consumption, art markets, institutions and aesthetic value, the culture industries, and, most recently, with historiographic issues around notions of temporal and spatial scale.

John Brewer engaged in two research projects. The first focused on Vesuvius, the buried cities and Naples in the 19th Century, uses this test case to examine the processes – economic, political, cultural and symbolic - by which places acquire particular identities. Using a wide range of materials – visitors books, travel accounts, scientific publications, images and simulacra and including a wide range of actors – politicians, merchants and diplomats, scientists, poets and novelists, indigenous peoples as well as visitors - it looks at the many versions of a place, how they fitted or clashed with one another and what was at stake in these characterizations.

The second project is about art and value in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His concern is not just with what might constitute value – how the art object was seen, but also with who conferred value, and had the authority to do so. His work is concerned with Giovanni Morelli, the Italian expert who is often deemed to be the founder of what was called scientific connoisseurship, and whose morphological method has been praised by Freud and by Carlo Ginsburg. Part of this project has already appeared as The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art, and Money (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Achievements

• Brewer has been awarded research grants and fellowships from Fulbright Foundation in 1968,1992-93; Harvard University in 1968-69; the UK Social Science Research Council in 1975-76; University of London's Twenty-seven Foundation in 1975, American Philosophical Society in 1977, 1982, Yale University in 1978-79; Huntington Library in 1973, 1978; the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1983-84; Royal Historical Society in 1989; J. Paul Getty Foundation in 1991-92; the University of Southampton in 1992; from the Guggenheim in 1992-93, 2000.
  
  His book “Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the 18th Century” won the Wolfson History Prize and was short-listed for the US National Book Awards in the category of criticism.

Works

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  • The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art and Money

    (In The American Leonardo, John Brewer traces the twisting...)

    2009
  • The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783

    (This powerful interpretation of English history provides ...)

    1988
  • A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

    (One April evening in 1779, Martha Ray, the pretty mistres...)

    2004
  • The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

    (The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and d...)

    1997
  • Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III

    (This book is a reappraisal of English politics in the fir...)

    1976
  • An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 1980
  • The Birth of a Consumer Society: Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England 1982

Connections

John Brewer's wife's name is Stella. They have two children.

Wife:

Stella Brewer