An internationally renowned scholar and distinguished critic of Scottish literature has returned to the University of Aberdeen, 30 years after his first appointment as a lecturer in the English Department.
Professor Cairns Craig has taken up the position of Director of the University’s world-leading Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS).
His role also extends to the Directorship of the second phase of the Arts and Humanities Research Centre (AHRC) in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, in succession to Professor Tom Devine, who played a key role in the establishment of the Institute and the Centre.
The AHRC in Aberdeen is a unique centre of excellence, carrying out comparative research on the history, literature and culture of Ireland and Scotland, and supervising high quality graduate programmes in these areas.
Aberdeen is one of only two AHRC Centres in the UK to achieve a second round of funding. It will receive £1.33million over five years commencing in January 2006 to develop further the projects which, since 2000, it has been conducting in conjunction with Trinity College, Dublin, and Queen’s University, Belfast.
Professor Craig has been an Honorary Professor at Aberdeen for the past five years and Chair of the Academic Advisory Board for the first phase of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies.
He said: “I’m already familiar with the Centre’s work and with the key researchers in the partner institutions in Ireland, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to carry forward a project which has opened up entirely new areas of research and study.
“The fact that this is happening at such an exciting and positive time, when the University is celebrating 500 years of teaching and learning, has made my return to Aberdeen all the more pleasurable.”
Professor Craig said his principal objective at Aberdeen would be to make the second phase of the AHRC Centre even more successful than the first. He said: “This will involve working closely with researchers in Dublin and Belfast as well as in Aberdeen.
“However, I also want to ensure that the Research Institute help support and develop Irish and Scottish Studies in all subject areas across the College of Arts and Social Sciences, consolidating Aberdeen’s leading international role at the forefront of these disciplines.”
In the 1980s, Professor Craig was General Editor of a groundbreaking History of Scottish Literature (1987-9), which was published by Aberdeen University Press, and he has been an influential contributor to the study of both Scottish and Irish literature. His first book was on Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1981), and his study of The Modern Scottish Novel (1999) was hailed as a critical work to match the creative achievements of contemporary Scottish novelists.
He is also widely recognised as a leading theorist of national cultures, and his collection of essays from 1996, Out of History, has provided the background for much recent work on Scottish culture.
Professor Craig’s key contributions in these fields have been acknowledged by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2003, and this year, by his becoming a Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor George Watson, the outgoing Director of RIISS, expressed his pleasure at Professor Craig’s appointment.
He said: “Cairns Craig, whom I have known for 30 years, is one of the really top scholars in the UK and Ireland, whose contribution to the future of Irish-Scottish studies here in Aberdeen will be immense.
“I welcome his appointment with the greatest satisfaction.”