Brian Cowan
PhD (Princeton)
Cowan CV 2012 [pdf]
Leacock, Rm 636
Department of History 855 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7
Brian Cowan has held appointments at Yale University and the University of Sussex before coming to McGill University in 2004. He studies the social and cultural history of ideas in early modern Britain and Europe and is particularly interested in the ways in which ideas were communicated in the preindustrial world. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2005), which was awarded the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association in 2006. His latest book, The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming) lays the groundwork for a new understanding the most important political trial of the eighteenth century. His additional publications on the history of early modern taste have ranged from studies of art auctions and connoisseurship to gastronomy and food writing.
Along with with Prof. Elizabeth Elbourne, he edits the Journal of British Studies (Univ. of Chicago Press) for the North American Conference on British Studies. He also serves on the editorial boards for the journals History Compass, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Early modern British and western European history, particularly political, intellectual and cultural history. Current Ph.D. students are working on the following topics:
- diplomacy and the public sphere in the 1650s
- print culture in eighteenth-century Scotland
- print culture and the public philosophy of David Hume
- the late seventeenth-century Mayor’s Court of the City of London
- the domestic politics of abolitionism in later eighteenth-century Britain
