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Department of Sociology

John Brewer

Honorary Professor

Email: john.brewer@warwick.ac.uk

Profile

Brewer was educated at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. He was Professor of Sociology, and former Head of Department of Sociology (2004–2007), at Aberdeen University, moving from Queen's University, Belfast in July 2004, to which he returned in 2013 as its first Professor of Post Conflict Studies. He was Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Queen's between 1993 and 2002. Brewer 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.

Brewer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (elected 1998), a Fellow of 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), President (2009–2012), 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). Brewer has been a member of the International Assessment Panel of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2002–2007), and sat on its Governing Council (2008–12). He was also a member of the ESRC's Virtual Research College (2005–10). He sat on the Governing Council of the Irish Research Council (2012–15) and the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK (2012–15). In 2001, he became a member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. In 2010 he was appointed to the United Nations' Roster of Global Experts for his expertise on peacebuilding.

He was awarded a Honorary DSSc from Brunel University in 2012 for services to social science, and awarded the British Sociological Association's Distinguished Service Prize for service to British sociology in 2023.

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Publications

  • Brewer, John (1986). After Soweto: An Unfinished Journey. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198274803.
  • Brewer, John (1994). Black and Blue: Policing in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198273820.
  • Brewer, John; Lockhart, Bill; Rodgers, Paula (1997). Crime in Ireland, 1945-95. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 9780198265702.
  • Brewer, John; Higgins, Gareth (1998). Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600-1998. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-74635-6.
  • Brewer, John (2000). Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. ISBN 978-0335202683.
  • Brewer, John (2003). C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-42139-8.
  • Brewer, John (2010). Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0745647777.
  • Brewer, John; Higgins, Gareth; Teeney, Francis (2011). Religion, Civil Society, and Peace in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198702078.
  • Brewer, John (2013). The Public Value of the Social Sciences: An Interpretive Essay. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781780931746
  • John Brewer, Bernie Hayes, Francis Teeney, Katrin Dudgeon, Natascha Mueller-Hirth and Shirley Lal Wijesinghe (2018),The Sociology of Everyday Life Peacebuilding.London Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-391-78974-3
  • John Brewer, Bernie Hayes and Francis Teeney (2018),The Sociology of Compromise after Conflict.London Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-78743-5
  • John Brewer and Azrini Wahidin (2021)Ex-Combatants' Voices: Transitioning from War to Peace in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka.London Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-030-61565-9.
  • John Brewer (2022)An Advanced Introduction to the Sociology of Peace Processes.Cheltenham Edward Elgar Publications. ISBN 978-1-839-10738-2.