Peter Ghosh

Peter R. Ghosh (/ɡəʊʃ/; gauche;^[1] born December 1954, Sutton Coldfield) is a British historian, specialising in the history of ideas and historiography.^[2] He was Jean Duffield Fellow in Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, and Professor of the History of Ideas at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.^[3]

Professor Peter Ghosh
Born	Peter R. Ghosh 1954 (age 70–71) Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, England
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Historian and academic
Title	Professor of the History of Ideas
Spouse	Helen Kirkby ​ (m. 1979)​
Children	2
Academic background
Alma mater	Merton College, Oxford Nuffield College, Oxford
Doctoral advisor	A. F. Thompson
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	20th century history Intellectual history
Institutions	Nuffield College, Oxford St Anne's College, Oxford

Career

Ghosh read Modern History at Merton College, Oxford as an undergraduate and continued his studies at graduate level at Nuffield College, Oxford, later becoming a Junior Research Fellow there.^[4] His abandoned doctoral thesis on Victorian finance was supervised by A. F. Thompson.^[5]

Ghosh was Jean Duffield Fellow in Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford from 1982 to his retirement in 2023.^[2] In January 2022 he was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of the History of Ideas by the University of Oxford.^[6]

After retiring he became a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College^[7] and continued to teach modern history at Jesus College.^[4]

He has two related research interests: first, the interface between political ideas and English politics, c. 1850 – 1895; secondly, the evolution of Western European and British ideas, including historiography, from the Enlightenment to the present.^[8]

He has written for the London Review of Books^[9] and appeared on In Our Time discussing Max Weber.^[10]

Personal life

Ghosh married Helen Kirkby, whom he met as a fellow History undergraduate at Oxford, in 1979.^[11] They have two children together.^[12] Their son William is an English tutor at Christ Church, Oxford.^[13]

Works

• Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (2006)
• A Historian Reads Max Weber: Essays on the Protestant Ethic (2008)
• Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic': Twin Histories (2014)
• Max Weber in Context: Essays in the History of German Ideas C. 1870-1930 (2016)