Henry Kamen

Henry A. Kamen (born 1936 in Rangoon) is a British historian.

Biography

Henry Arthur Kamen was born in Rangoon in 1936, the son of Maurice Joseph Kamen, an Anglo-Burmese engineer working for Shell Oil, and his wife, Agnes Frizelle, by descent half Anglo-Irish and half Nepalese. Kamen was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar school, from where he won a Major Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, earning his doctorate at St Antony's College. During national Service he studied Russian, and his first book was a translation of the poems of Boris Pasternak ("Boris Pasternak in the Interlude Poems 1945-1960").

Career

Between 1966 and 1992, Kamen taught early modern Spanish history at the University of Warwick. He has worked at various universities in Spain. In 1970, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 1984 he was appointed Herbert F. Johnson Professor at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin - Madison. He was a Professor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Barcelona from 1993 until his retirement in 2002. Since then he has continued lecturing and writing, and lives currently in Spain and in the United States. He is an influential contributor to the pages of the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo.