Peter Brown (historian)

Peter Robert Lamont Brown
Brown at the Balzan Prize Ceremony, 2011
Born	(1935-07-26) 26 July 1935 (age 81) Dublin, Ireland
Alma mater	University of Oxford
Occupation	Historian
Notable work	Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; 2000); The World of Late Antiquity (1971); The Cult of the Saints (1981); The Body and Society (1988); Through the Eye of a Needle (2012)
Awards	Heineken Prize for History (1994); Kluge Prize (2008); Balzan Prize (2011); Dan David Prize (2015)

Peter Robert Lamont Brown, FBA, (born 26 July 1935) is Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity. His work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and the relation between religion and society.

Peter Brown was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a Scots-Irish Protestant family. He was educated at Aravon School, then an old and distinguished preparatory school in Ireland, and subsequently, from 1948, at Shrewsbury School in Shropshire, one of the prominent "public" schools in England. When asked to comment on his intellectual formation, Brown has indicated that he completed his public schooling a year early, returning to Ireland (as he had done for school holidays) in 1952, the year he turned 17. It was then in Dublin that he read Mikhail Rostovtzeff's The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), which he borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. He went on to read Modern History at New College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1956. In his final academic year, he undertook a Special Subject on The Age of Augustine, and was particularly influenced by the writings of Marrou and Piganiol.

Following his graduation Brown began, but did not complete, a doctoral thesis under the external supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano (at that time Professor of Ancient History at University College London). The potential he had shown as an undergraduate was recognized by the award of the Harmsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, and a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. At a time when it was normally possible to remain in the College after the Prize Fellowship, All Souls College subsequently elected him a Research Fellow in 1963 and a Senior Research Fellow in 1970. The Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford appointed him a Special Lecturer in 1970 and a Reader (ad hominem) in 1973. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1971. Brown left Oxford to become Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway College in the University of London (1975–78). He subsequently left Britain to become Professor of Classics and History in the University of California at Berkeley (1978–86) and then Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University (1986–2011). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1988, and a Resident Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.