John Brewer

I am a retired academic who has taught in Britain, Italy and the United States, and currently lives between Munich and Boston. My last job was at the California Institute of Technology. I have edited or written more than a dozen books on a wide range of subjects: crime, politics, public finance and taxation, consumerism, the culture industries, madness and the history of feeling. I combine history, art history and literary studies, trying to write for a well-informed but non-specialist audience. My study of eighteenth-century English culture, Pleasures of the Imagination, won the Wolfson Prize in 1998. My latest book, Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions will appear with Yale University Press in the Fall. I am an inveterate traveler, a passionate cook, and a lover of oddities and strong-minded quirky individuals.