Professor Peter Clarke

Biography

Peter Clarke matriculated at St John’s College, where he read History, staying in Cambridge for his PhD.  After teaching for fourteen years at University College London, he returned to Cambridge in 1980, successively as a lecturer, reader and professor in the History Faculty, combined with a Fellowship at St John’s (1980-2000).  He was awarded the degree of LittD in 1988 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989.  He helped to found the Cambridge branch of the Social Democratic Party and served as chairman 1981-2.  He has published ten books since 1971, initially on British political history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and later branching out into the history of Keynesian economics and the changing role of Britain in the world. His latest book is Mr Churchill’s Profession: statesman, orator, writer (Bloomsbury 2012).  He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, on economic as well as historical themes. While Master of Trinity Hall, his major initiative was the college’s strategic plan, which provided for the building and funding of the recent Wychfield development.