People
T.H. Breen
Colonial America
Office: Harris Hall #L31
Phone: 847-491-7033
E-mail: t-breen
northwestern.edu
T.H. Breen (PhD Yale, 1968), William Smith Mason Professor of American History, is an Early American historian interested in the history of political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. A Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center as well as the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford University. He has won several awards for distinguished teaching, including one from the Northwestern Alumni Society. His publications include five monographs, among them Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (recipient of the T. Saloutos Prize) and Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (winner of the Historical Preservation Book Prize), as well as portions of the highly successful undergraduate text, America: Past and Present. Breen published Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, with Oxford University Press, and won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book in 2004 on the American Revolution. A recent recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award from the German government and a Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute, he has now completed a book entitled American Insurgents -- American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010). He is the founding director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies and is currently a visiting professor in the Humanities Division at California Institute for Technology (2012-2013).
