Brian Cowan

Brian Cowan is a historian of early modern Britain and Europe. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, and the Yale Center for British Art. He has previously taught at the University of Sussex (UK) and Yale University (USA). He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, (Yale University Press, 2005), which was awarded the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association in 2006. His second book, The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) uses book history to provide a new understanding of the most important political trial of the eighteenth century. He is a member of the Multigraph Collective responsible for Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2018) which studies eighteenth and nineteenth-century print culture as part of a multi-media environment. He has edited several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fame in the Age of Enlightenment for Bloomsbury Academic, and The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (co-edited with Scott Sowerby) for Boydell & Brewer.

He edits the monograph series ‘Cultures of Early Modern Europe’ for Bloomsbury Academic with Prof. Beat Kümin (Warwick Univ., UK). He is a founding member of the international research group Sociabilités/Sociability du long dix-huitième siècle (1650-1850) and a member of the Quebec-based Groupe de Récherche en Histoire des Sociabilités. He is currently working on a handbook of the history of the European Enlightenment and a multi-volume collection of essays on the history of sociability in the early modern world. His additional publications on the history of early modern taste have ranged from studies of art auctions and connoisseurship to gastronomy and food writing.