An expert in Scottish politics with family connections in North East Scotland will return to his roots later this year when he joins the University of Aberdeen.
Professor Michael Keating (49), formerly of the University of Strathclyde and currently Professor of Politics at the University of Ontario, will join Aberdeen’s Department of Politics and International Relations in August.
In an innovative collaborative arrangement Prof Keating will be seconded to the prestigious European University Institute at Florence next year to develop his interests in regionalism and nationalism in Europe.
Born in North-east England of Scottish and Irish parents, Michael Keating took his BA at the University of Oxford and PhD at Glasgow College of Technology. Since the mid 1970s, Prof Keating has been a major contributor on the changing Scottish political system.
The Scottish Parliament will provide a main focus for his work in Aberdeen; he has a particular interest in comparative work and Scotland’s place in Europe. His appointment will reinforce Aberdeen’s strength in the politics of small nations and in European studies more broadly.
Among his 18 books are works about Scotland, such as Labour and Scottish Nationalism (1979), The Government of Scotland (1983), and Politics and Public Policy in Scotland (1983). Last year, he edited Remaking the Union, a study of the implications of devolution in British politics.
In recent years, he has worked extensively on nationalism and devolution in Europe, with studies on Spain, France and the European Union and lectures regularly on these questions in English, French and Spanish across Europe and North America. His comparative work, Nations against the State: the New Politics of Nationalism in Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec, was translated into Spanish and French, while his textbook on The Politics of Modern Europe has just appeared in its second edition.
He is currently working on a study of multinational states which argues that we can accommodate national diversity in a liberal democratic society only by reconsidering the concept of sovereignty.
His volume, Comparative Urban Politics, won a special book award from the American Political Science Association in 1993 and Les Défis du Nationalisme Moderne won the Richard Arès Prize for 1997 for the best contribution to understanding contemporary Quebec.
Further information:
Alison Ramsay, Press Officer (01224) 273778
Michael Keating
Professor of Political Science
University of Western Ontario
Social Science Centre
London
Canada, N6A 5C2
(1) 519 679 2111 Ext. 5160
FAX 519 661 3904
keating@julian.uwo.ca