Peter Clark (historian)

Peter Alan Clark (born 24 May 1944 ) is a British historian. Since 2000, he was professor of European urban history at the University of Helsinki. He retired in 2011.

Clark was educated at Balliol College, Oxford and graduated (Modern History first class) in 1966. He started his career as a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was then lecturer, reader and later professor of economic and social history at the University of Leicester. From 1985 to 1999, he was the first director of the Centre for Urban History of the University of Leicester.

In 1989, he was co-founder (with Bernard Lepetit and Herman Diederiks) of the European Association for Urban History and served as its treasurer from 1989 to 2010. He was also Secretary of International Commission for the History of Towns 1993 to 1995.

He has contributed to a number of publications, including the Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Clark is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, of which he was a Council member from 1991 to 1995. He was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2011 and the Royal Belgian Academy (Flemish) in 2015. He was awarded an Honorary Degree of Philosophy by Stockholm University in 2012.