Peter Burke

Peter Burke (born 1937) was educated at St Ignatius’s College, Stamford Hill, London, and St John’s College Oxford. He was one of the first junior lecturers to be appointed at the University of Sussex, where he remained for 17 years (1962-79). He moved to Cambridge in 1979, where he became Professor of Cultural History. He retired from the Chair in 2004 but remains a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia García Pallares-Burke.

Peter Burke has been a visiting teacher or researcher in Berlin, Brussels, Canberra; Groningen, Heidelberg, Los Angeles, Nijmegen, Paris (the EHESS), Princeton, São Paulo. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academia Europea; Ph. D (honoris causa), Universities of Lund, Copenhagen, Bucharest.

He has published 26 books and his work has so far been translated into 31 languages. For most of his career he has worked on the cultural and social history of early modern Europe, but his current project is the social history of knowledge