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Brian Street


Brian Vincent Street (October 1943 – 21 June 2017) was a professor emeritus of language education at King's College London and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education in University of Pennsylvania. During his career, he mainly worked on literacy in both theoretical and applied perspectives, and is perhaps best known for his book Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984).

Born in Manchester to Dorothy Groves, a woman from a Russian Jewish background, Street was told his father, an Irish pilot, had died in action during the war. Street was adopted by Margaret Nellie Street and Harry Street; the family moved to Devon in 1945. The elder Street found work in a wool factory, where his adopted son suffered a serious eye injury at the age of 18.

Street was educated at the Christian Brothers Grammar School in Plymouth and read English and, for his doctorate, Anthropology at Oxford University; his PhD was supervised by Godfrey Lienhardt. From 1974, he taught social and cultural anthropology at the University of Sussex, taking up a post as Professor of Language and Education at King's College London and for more than fifteen years he supervised doctoral students and taught graduate workshops on ethnography, student writing in higher education and language and literacy at King's. He was appointed in 1988 as a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and his summer schools at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil continued until shortly before he died. He retired from his full-time post at KCL in 2010.

In 2009 he was elected Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and has been Chair of the Education Committee of the RAI since 2006. Later in his career, he became involved in development projects in South Asia and Africa using ethnographic perspectives in training literacy and numeracy teachers in a programme known as LETTER (Learning Empowerment through Training in Ethnographic Research). He also worked with colleagues in Brazil with particular interest in ethnographic and academic literacies perspectives. A collection of papers (coedited with Judy Kalman) concerning Latin America was published in 2012.


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