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Conyers Read
Conyers Read (1881-1959) was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago a...view moreConyers Read (1881-1959) was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association (1949-1950), served with the American Red Cross during WWI, and the Office of Strategic Services in WWII.
Born on April 25, 1881 in Philadelphia, the son of William Franklin Read and Victoria Eliza Conyers, he graduated AB summa cum laude from Harvard in 1903. He next studied modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating B.Litt., before he returned to Harvard to take a Ph.D. in 1908.
Following a post as a lecturer at Harvard, he taught at Princeton (1909-1910) before joining the University of Chicago for the next decade, first as an associate professor, then as a professor. In 1920 Read returned to Philadelphia to join his father’s textile firm William F. Read & Sons. He remained a non-resident professor of the University of Chicago, and in 1932 became executive secretary of the American Historical Association. In 1934 he returned to academia as a Professor of English History at the University of Pennsylvania.
Read’s first major research project was his edition of the Bardon Papers, documents relating to the imprisonment and trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, published in London in the Camden Series in 1909. In 1925 he published Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth in three volumes, which was awarded a Folger Shakespeare Library prize.
Read retired in 1951 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he held for two years. He also received an Honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951, was made Professor Emeritus of English History at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, and received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Temple University in 1955.
Read passed away on December 24, 1959, aged 78.view less