Stuart Clark was born in 1942 in Marple, Cheshire. He studied at University of Wales, Swansea and at Cambridge. He was senior lecturer in the Department of History at UW Swansea from 1995-98 and then Professor from 1998 to the present. He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Lilly Fellow at the National Humanities Centre, North Carolina. He was elected to the British Academy in 2000.