Quentin Skinner - Biography

Biography

Quentin Skinner was born the second son of Alexander Skinner, CBE (died 1979), and Winifred Rose Margaret, née Duthie (died 1982). Educated at Bedford School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he was elected into a Fellowship there in 1962 upon obtaining a double-starred first in History, but immediately gained a teaching Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he remained until moving to the University of London in 2008. He is now an Honorary Fellow of both Christ's College and Gonville and Caius College.

In the middle 1970s he spent four formative years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, initially as a historian and latterly in the School of Social Science. It was there that he met Raymond Geuss, later a colleague at Cambridge. Together with John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock Skinner has been said to have founded the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought. In 1978 he was appointed to the chair of Political Science at the University of Cambridge, and in 1996 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History. He was pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge in 1999. In 1979 he married Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London; they have a daughter and a son.

Skinner has delivered many prestigious lecture-series, including the Gauss Seminars at Princeton (1980), the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1980), the Messenger Lectures at Cornell (1983), the Tanner Lectures at Harvard (1984), the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Kent (1995), the Ford Lectures at Oxford (2003), the Page-Barbour Lectures at Virginia (2003), the Benedict Lectures at Boston (2005) and the Adorno Lectures at Frankfurt (2005).

Skinner was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London for the 2007-2008 academic year, and has been Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary since October 2008.

Skinner is a Fellow of numerous scholarly associations, including the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and his scholarship has won him many awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History (1979); the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize of the British Political Studies Association (2006); the Benjamin Lippincott Award (2001) and the David Easton Award (2007) of the American Political Science Association; the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis (2008); and a Balzan Prize (2006). He holds honorary degrees from many Universities, including Aberdeen, Athens, East Anglia, Chicago, Harvard, Helsinki, Leuven, Oxford, Santiago and St Andrews.