Brian was a professor emeritus of language education at King’s College London and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education in University of Pennsylvania. He mainly worked on literacy in both theoretical and applied perspectives, and is perhaps best known for his book Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984).

Brian taught social and cultural anthropology for more than twenty years at the University of Sussex, and latterly he has supervised doctoral students and taught graduate workshops on ethnography, student writing in higher education and language and literacy. In 2009 he was elected Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and was been Chair of the Education Committee of the RAI since 2006.