Curated category
Fellows of the British Academy
- C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm on the 22nd of November 1963, and died a few minutes later at age 64. That same afternoon, approximately 55…
- John Baines (Egyptologist)John Robert Baines was born on the 17th of March 1946, and by the time he was thirty years old, he had already become one of the youngest professors at the…
- Tim DysonTim Dyson was born in 1949. This date marks the start of a life that would eventually reshape how scholars understand India's population growth.
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to…
- Odd Arne WestadOdd Arne Westad was born on the 5th of January 1960 in Norway. He began his academic journey at the University of Oslo as an undergraduate student.
- A. C. BradleyA. C. Bradley was once so dominant in the study of Shakespeare that a satirical poem imagined the playwright himself failing a civil service examination…
- James Graham-CampbellJames Graham-Campbell entered the world on the 7th of February 1947. This date marks the beginning of a life that would eventually reshape our understanding…
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New…
- Esther DufloEsther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in…
- Jasper GriffinJasper Griffin arrived in the world on the 29th of May 1937. His early years unfolded under the roof of Christ's Hospital, a private school located in…
- John Boardman (art historian)John Boardman was born in Ilford, Essex, on the 20th of August 1927, and he spent the next ninety-six years becoming one of the most prolific scholars…
- Joan RobinsonJoan Robinson coined a word that the United States Supreme Court would still be using nearly nine decades after she invented it.
- Angus DeatonAngus Deaton was born on the 19th of October 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he grew up to become one of the economists whose work most fundamentally…
- Janet NelsonJanet Nelson died on the 14th of October 2024, at the age of 82, after years living with Alzheimer's disease. She was known to friends and colleagues by a…
- Rana MitterRana Mitter was born in Cambridge on the 11th of August 1969, into a household where scholarship was the family trade. His father, Partha Mitter, taught art…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHoward Hayes Scullard was born on the 9th of February 1903 in Bedford, England, and spent his career turning the chaotic centuries of Rome's rise and fall…
- Alfred MarshallAlfred Marshall was born on the 26th of July 1842 in Bermondsey, London, the son of a Bank of England clerk named William Marshall.
- Peter Brown (historian)Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935. He is an Irish historian who reshaped how scholars think about an entire era.
- Thomas William Rhys DavidsThomas William Rhys Davids was serving as Magistrate of Galle in Sri Lanka. A document written in an unfamiliar script was brought into his courtroom as…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreGabriel Turville-Petre entered the world at Bosworth Hall in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the 25th of March 1908.
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex…
- James George FrazerJames George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer.
- Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)Stuart Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, one young man among the first large-scale emigration of West Indians to England.
- Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins is remembered today for a single line: "Humans want what they can't have." That quote made him famous. But it also compresses a career spent…
- T. D. KendrickThomas Downing Kendrick entered the world on the 1st of April 1895 in Handsworth, a suburb of Birmingham. His father Thomas H.
- Eric HobsbawmEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th…
- Andrew Wallace-HadrillAndrew Frederick Wallace-Hadrill was born in Oxford on the 29th of July 1951, the son of a mediaeval historian. That family connection to the deep past may…
- Geoffrey KirkGeoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in December 1921 in Nottingham, and by the end of his life he had produced one of the most ambitious commentaries on Homer…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing…
- H. J. RoseHerbert Jennings Rose once sat at Board 1 in a cable match between American and English universities. On the 23rd of March 1907, he drew his game against the…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in…
- Frederick CoplestonFrederick Charles Copleston was born on the 10th of April 1907 in the parish of Trull, near Taunton in Somerset, and he would go on to write one of the most…
- John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge on the 5th of June 1883, the son of an economist father and a mother who would go on to become her town's second…
- Roy PorterRoy Sydney Porter entered the world on the 31st of December 1946. He grew up in South London and attended Wilson's School in Camberwell.
- Quentin SkinnerQuentin Skinner refused a knighthood. When Cambridge made him Regius Professor of History in 1996, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in…
- A. L. RowseA. L. Rowse was born on the 4th of December 1903 in Tregonissey, a village near St Austell in Cornwall, the son of a china clay worker.
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…
- Peter TrudgillPeter Trudgill was born on the 7th of November 1943 in Norwich, England, and grew up in the nearby area of Thorpe St Andrew.