Information

Membership Number: FCA3401

Membership Type: Fellowship

Division: Humanities

Corresponding Email: ***1000@cam.ac.uk

Homepage(s): https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-peter-burke 

Present and Previous Positions

Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge

Emeritus Professor of History, University of Cambridge 

Professor Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, where he was elected an Official Fellow in 1979. Before moving to Cambridge, he taught at the University of Sussex from 1962 to 1979. Across his Cambridge years, he served successively as Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of Cultural History, and at Emmanuel College, he also held the positions of Fellow Librarian and Fellow Archivist.

Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests

History of Knowledge; History of Historical Thought

"I identify myself as a cultural, social and intellectual historian who has focused successively on Renaissance Italy, on Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, and on the history of knowledge in the West, 1500-2000. My work has always been interdisciplinary, drawing in particular on anthropology and sociology, social psychology, art history and literary history. Since my student days I have been inspired by the French ‘school of Annales’."

Professor Burke is one of the most influential historians of culture and historical thought of his generation. His work has long centered on the social and cultural history of Europe, especially from roughly 1500 to 1700, with major and sustained contributions to Renaissance studies, the history of historical writing, the social history of language, and the social history of knowledge. He has also been deeply concerned with the relationship between history and neighboring disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, and psychology. 

In later years, he has extended his work on the history of knowledge into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, more broadly, into Europe and the Americas. What makes Professor Burke particularly important within the humanities is not only the range of the subjects he has studied, but the way he has helped shape cultural history itself as a field. His scholarship moves with unusual ease between intellectual history, social history, historiography, language, images, and the circulation of knowledge, while remaining clear, synthetic, and accessible across national and disciplinary boundaries. His work has encouraged generations of historians to think more broadly about how societies remember, communicate, classify, and interpret the world. This characterization is an editorial synthesis based on his officially listed research areas, career profile, and publications.

Honors, Awards and Other Membership

Fellow of the British Academy (elected 1994)

Member of Academia Europaea (elected 1995)

Recipient of the Academia Europaea Erasmus Medal (1998)

Honorary Fellow, St John’s College, University of Oxford

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Honorary Professor, National University of Colombia (Medellín) 

Honorary Doctorates (Ph.D Honoris Causa) Lund, Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zurich, Brussels, Oviedo

Selected Publications

Books CORE.docx

articles CORE.docx

Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. Routledge, 2025. (First published 1978.)
The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries. Blackwell, 1998.
A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Polity, 2000.
A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia. Polity, 2012.
History and Historians in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2002.
What is Cultural History? 3rd ed. Polity, 2018.
Ignorance: A Global History. Yale University Press, 2024 paperback ed. 

Other Information

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/profiles/peter-burke-FBA/ 

https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Burke_Peter 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Burke_(historian) 

Professor Burke’s scholarship is notable not only for its distinction within historical studies, but also for its unusually wide civilizational and interdisciplinary resonance. His work has consistently encouraged historians to move beyond narrow political narrative and to attend more closely to language, symbol, practice, communication, memory, and the circulation of knowledge. In this sense, he has been one of the major figures in broadening what historians study and how they study it. Another striking feature of his career is its international range. The British Academy notes that his scholarly work has long engaged the social and cultural history of Europe “from Galway to the Urals,” while his later research has extended into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into Brazilian intellectual history as well. The combination of geographic breadth, methodological openness, and long-term influence helps explain why Peter Burke is widely regarded as one of the defining historians of culture and knowledge of his generation.

Acceptance letter.docx