T. H. Breen

Who is T. H. Breen?

T.H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. He is also the founding director of the Kaplan Humanities Center and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern. Breen is a specialist on the American Revolution; he studies the history of early America with a special interest in political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. Breen has published multiple books and over sixty articles. In 2010 he released his latest book, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People. Breen won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book on the American Revolution for Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, the T. Saloutus Prize for his book Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters of the Eve of Revolution, and the Historical Preservation Book Prize for his work Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories. Breen also holds several awards for distinguished teaching from Northwestern.

Breen received his Ph.D in history from Yale University. He also holds an honorary MA from Oxford University. In addition to the appointment at Northwestern University, he has taught at Cambridge University, at Oxford University, and at University of Chicago, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology. He is an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also enjoyed research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. An essay he published on the end of slavery in Massachusetts became the basis for a full-length opera that was produced in Chicago. He has written for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books.