He is currently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History Emeritus at Northwestern University, Illinois, and a James Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont. He is the founding director of the Kaplan Humanities Center and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern. Breen is a specialist on the American Revolution. He studies the history of early America with a special interest in political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. Breen has published multiple books and over 60 articles. In 2010, he released his latest book, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People.[3][4] Breen won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book on the American Revolution for Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004), the T. Saloutus Prize for agricultural history for his book Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters of the Eve of Revolution, and the Historical Preservation Book Prize for his work Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories, and several prizes for "George Washington's Journey: The President Forges a New Nation." Breen also holds awards for distinguished teaching from Northwestern.
Breen currently lives in Greensboro, Vermont, where he is currently completing a book entitled "The Farmer and the Aristocrat: American Revolution on Trial." He is married to Susan, and has two children, Sarah and Bant, and three grandchildren.
^Crowley, John E. (October 1986). "review of Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution by T. H. Breen". The American Historical Review. 91 (4): 982–983. doi:10.1086/ahr/91.4.982-a. p. 983