Brian Harrison

Sir Brian Howard Harrison (born 9 July 1937) is a British historian and academic. From 1996 to 2004, he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. From 2000 to 2004, he was also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Early life, family and education Harrison was born on 9 July 1937. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, an independent school in London. From 1956 to 1958, between school and university, he undertook his national service with the Malta Signal Squadron. From 1961-4 he was a senior scholar at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and from 1964-7 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where in 1966, he completed his D.Phil. thesis The temperance question in England, 1829–1869. The thesis was supervised by Peter Mathias.

Academic career Harrison was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2004. He was additionally the editor of Oxford Dictionary of National Biography from January 2000 to September 2004. Since 2004, he has been an emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Harrison also did a video interview with the Cambridge historian and social anthropologist Alan Macfarlane in 2012, which was also published in prose format.

Between 1974 and 1981 Harrison conducted a series of oral history interviews with surviving suffrage campaigners, their relatives and employees, known as The Suffrage Interviews, or Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews. The recordings were deposited with The Women's Library in 1981, and are now available online via The British Library of Political and Economic Science. The Library is working on a Wikidata project, WikiProject LSESuffrageInterviewsProject, which seeks to explore connections between individuals and organizations mentioned within the collection, and make the resource accessible to researchers in new ways.

Personal life In 1967, Harrison married Vicky Greggain.

Honours Harrison was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 2005 New Year Honours for "services to scholarship". He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) on . He is also an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

A book of essays, Reform and its Complexities in Modern Britain: Essays Inspired by Sir Brian Harrison, was published in his honour in 2022.

Selected works