T. H. Breen

Breen received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in history from Yale University. He also holds an honorary M.A. from Oxford University. In addition to the appointment at Northwestern University, he has taught at Cambridge University (as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions), at Oxford University (as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History) (2000-2001), and at the 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, Center for Advanced Study, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, the Munich Center for Advanced Study, the Historisches Kolleg (Munich), and the MacArthur Foundation. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of American Historians. An essay he published on the end of slavery in Massachusetts became the basis for the full-length opera "Slip-Knot" that was produced in Chicago. Breen is an alumnus of the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental History (Munich). He has written for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books.

Timothy H. Breen (born September 5, 1942 in Ohio) is currently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History Emeritus at Northwestern University and a James Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont. He is 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 60 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 (2004), the T. Saloutus Prize for agricultural history 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, and several prizes for "George Washington's Journey: The President Forges a New Nation." Breen also holds awards for distinguished teaching from Northwestern.