John David Brewer

John David Brewer 1951- was born in Ludlow, Shropshire in 1951 and studied at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham.

He is Professor of Sociology, and former Head of Department of Sociology (2004-2007), at Aberdeen University, moving from Queen’s University Belfast in July 2004. He was Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Queen’s between 1993-2002. He taught at the University of East Anglia before moving to Queen’s in 1981. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University (1989), St John’s College Oxford (1992), Corpus Christi College Cambridge (2002) and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (2003). He was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2007-2008.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (elected 1998), an Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences (elected 2003), a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (elected 2004), then only the third sociologist to be elected in the Academy’s 217-year history, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 2008).

He has been Chair of the British Sociological Association (2004-2006), a member of the National Committee for Economics and Social Science of the Royal Irish Academy (1997-1999), and a Board Member of the ESRC’s Training and Development Board (2005-2007). He has been a member of the International Assessment Panel of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2002-2007), and currently sits on its Governing Council (2008-). He is also a member of the ESRC’s Virtual Research College (2005-). In 2001 he became a member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

He is author and co-author of eleven books, including: Inside the RUC (Clarendon Press, Oxford), After Soweto (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Black and Blue (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Crime in Ireland 1945-95 (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Police, Public Order and the State (Macmillan; now in its 2nd edition), Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland 1600-1998 (Macmillan), Ethnography (Open University Press) and C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence (Palgrave). He is also editor of Can South Africa Survive and Restructuring South Africa both with Macmillan and co-editor of the A-Z of Social Research with Sage. Has over 30 contributions in edited collections and 40 peer reviewed articles in journals such as British Journal of Sociology (7 times), Sociology (5 times), Sociological Review (3 times), Ethnic and Racial Studies (3 times), as well as in Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, Human Studies, History of Human Sciences, American Behavioral Scientist, Sociology of Health and Illness, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Sociolinguistics and African Affairs (3 times), amongst others. In total has earned grant income to the value of £5.2 millions.

He publishes in the following areas: crime and policing, religion and ethno-religious conflict, the sociology of the Bible, peace processes and post-violence adjustments, qualitative research methodology, especially ethnography, Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment, and interpretative sociological theory.

[http://www.abdn.ac.uk]