Brown trained many leading scholars in Middle East studies.
In 1962, he completed his Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University and taught there before joining Princeton’s faculty in 1966.
In 2005, Brown received the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award by the University of Arkansas Press and the university’s King Fahd Center of Middle East and Islamic Studies for his translation of “Consult Them in the Matter: A 19th-Century Islamic Argument for Constitutional Government,” a treatise by Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf, the 19th-century Tunisian bureaucrat and reformer about Ibn Khaldun's muqaddima.
[6] The work is considered a pioneering text in modern Arab and Islamic political philosophy.
In 1985, he worked with the New Jersey Network to produce a documentary television series titled “World & Time,” comprising five half-hour telecasts aired in June on N.J. public broadcast stations.