After completing his graduate work, he returned to the
University of Cambridge, where he was a
research fellow at
St John's College. He was then elected a
fellow of
Christ's College and appointed to a university lectureship in history. Cannadine was appointed to the professorial chair of history at
Columbia University in 1988, returning to Britain ten years later as director of the
Institute of Historical Research at the
University of London and, subsequently, as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History. In 2008 he joined the
History Department of Princeton University from which he has announced his intention to retire at the end of the 2022–2023 academic year. In 2014 he was appointed
Editor of the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (
ODNB) and also to a visiting professorship at the
University of Oxford. Cannadine will step down from his editorship of the
ODNB on 31 July 2026 in favour of
William Whyte. Cannadine has held many other visitorial appointments: at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (twice), at the
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in
Uppsala (twice), at
Birkbeck College,
London, at the
Whitney Humanities Center, Yale, at
ANU Canberra, at the
NHC North Carolina, at the
Huntington Library and at
New York University Stern School of Business. He is the general editor of the
Penguin History of Britain and
the Penguin History of Europe. He is currently completing a volume on the history of the
Ford Foundation.
Works Cannadine's books include
The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990);
G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992);
Class in Britain (1998);
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001);
Mellon: An American Life (2006);
The Thirty Year Rule (jointly, 2009);
The Right Kind of History (jointly, 2011); and
The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond our Differences (2013). His most recent publications are
Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 (2018), published for the
Penguin History of Britain series, as well as two edited volumes on
Westminster Abbey and on
Anthony Blunt. Cannadine has delivered many public lectures including the Raleigh Lecture at the British Academy (1997), the Carnochan Lecture at
Stanford University (2001), the Linbury Lecture at the
National Gallery (2002), the T. S. Eliot Lecture at
Washington University in St. Louis (2003), the
George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge (2007), the Inaugural Lecture for the Centre for British Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin (2010), the Crosby Kemper Lecture at Westminster College (
Fulton, Missouri), the Jon Sigurosson Lecture at the
University of Iceland (2012), the Haaga Lecture at the
Huntington Library (2012), the Creighton Lecture at the
University of Toronto (2013), the Robb Lectures at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand (2015), the Wolfson Anniversary Lecture at the
University of Glasgow (2015), the Oxford University Press Centenary Lecture (2017) and the Founder's Lecture at
St John's College, Oxford (2019). == Public work ==