She earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 under the supervision of John J. Gumperz.
Her dissertation is titled, "Language, interaction, and sex roles in a Mayan community: a study of politeness and the position of women."
Brown was the co-developer of the theory of politeness, a key topic in 20th century sociolinguistics.
With her research collaborator and husband, linguist Stephen Levinson, she is co-author of the seminal work, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage[1][2] (cited more than 40,000 times).
[4] She is currently an emeritus member of the Language Acquisition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.