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About the Institute

"Since its inauguration five years ago, the Centre has become a world leader in Scottish and Irish studies and has produced a formidable body of research into the histories, languages, literatures and cultures of the two countries".
First Minister of Scotland Jack McConnell

The Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen is the first of its kind in the world. It is a unique interdisciplinary centre of excellence which offers taught masters and doctoral programmes of the highest quality in the history, literature and culture of Ireland and Scotland, and carries out research across these disciplines. 

It is host to the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose role at the forefront of contemporary research was confirmed when it was one of only two (out of ten) centres to receive a second five years of AHRC funding (2006-2010). At £1.34m, the funding for Phase 2 of the Centre’s work represents one of the largest ever research awards in the humanities in the UK .

The Director of both the Research Institute and the AHRC Centre is Professor Cairns Craig, general editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987-89) and author of Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982), Out of History (1996), and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). Deputy Director of the Institute is Professor Patrick Crotty, who is currently completing The New Penguin Book of Irish Verse and (with Alan Riach) the three-volume, annotated Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid . Associate Director is Professor David Dumville, Professor of History and Palaeography, who joined Aberdeen University from the University of Cambridge in 2005.

The Research Institute forms the focus in Aberdeen for researchers from a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities, including literature, history, Celtic studies and philosophy, as well as for researchers in the Social Sciences and the history of science. The AHRC Centre also includes researchers in Aberdeen ’s partner institutions, Trinity College, Dublin and Queen’s University, Belfast .

Where we are

The home of the Institute is Humanity Manse, an elegant eighteenth-century town house in the heart of Old Aberdeen, which contains the administrative offices of the Research Institute and the AHRC Centre, and seminar rooms and accommodation both for research fellows and for graduate students working on Irish and Scottish projects. It has a common room for general use with a selection of periodicals and books.

Humanity Manse is a short walk from the main affiliated departments in the School of Divinity , History & Philosophy and the School of Language & Literature. The University Library and its Department of special Collections are also close by.

See: Campus Map

Arts and Humanities Research Council

The AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies >>

 

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