Brian Cowan

Candidate statement

Brian Cowan is Associate Professor of History at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. His publications include The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, (Yale, 2005); The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); and as a member of the Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation, (Chicago, 2018). He has edited The Cultural History of Fame in the Age of Enlightenment, (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and, with Scott Sowerby, The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England, (Boydell, 2021). He is currently President of the Board of Directors for the international Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique (GIS) devoted to ‘sociability in the long eighteenth century’, which recently launched DIGIT.EN.S, the online encyclopedia of British sociability in the long eighteenth century: https://www.digitens.org/en

He has served as a member of the editorial board for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2008-11) and was co-editor, with Elizabeth Elbourne, of the Journal of British Studies (2010-15). He has been an active member of both ASECS and the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) for most of the twenty-first century. He is committed to bringing an international perspective to the study of the global eighteenth century, and to rethinking the role of scholarly societies in a fast-changing environment.