Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at at Queen's College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies

Journal of Peasant Studies

The Journal of Peasant Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into the social structures, institutions, actors, and processes of change in the rural areas of the developing world. It was established in 1973 with Terence J...

. Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his finding that this has been an inherently conservative, reactionary process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.

Selected publications

• Brass, Tom (2000) Peasants, populism, and postmodernism, London; Frank Cass
• Brass, Tom (2003) Latin American peasants, London; Frank Cass
• Brass, Tom and Linden, Marcel van der (eds) (1997) Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues, International and Comparative Social History, 5., Peter Lang, Bern
• Brass, Tom (1999) Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour. Case Studies and Debates, The Library of Peasant Studies, 16. Frank Cass, London