Dr Bradford Bow

Biography

Dr Bradford Bow is an intellectual historian of Britain, Scotland, and America during the long eighteenth century, with a broader interest in the global contexts of Enlightenment intellectual and moral culture. Dr Bow completed a PhD in the fields of Enlightenment History and Scottish Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. During the 2012-13 academic year, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and an adjunct lecturing position at Edinburgh University. At that time, he also served as the Acting Director of the MSc Intellectual History programme and organised research activities for the Carnegie Trust funded project ‘Scotland’s Trans-Atlantic Relations’ (STAR). Following this, he held the inaugural Jack Miller Center-Huntington Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Dr Bow returned to the University of Edinburgh during the 2013-14 academic year as a Teaching Fellow in Enlightenment History and Deputy Director of the MSc Intellectual History programme. Afterwards, he was an Assistant Professor of Global Intellectual History at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) between 2014 and 2019. Dr Bow joined the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy in August 2019. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Distinguished Shinhan Professor at Yonsei University.

Research Overview

My research interests centre on the global intellectual history of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy during the long eighteenth century (1660-1840). From a transnational and global perspective, I address questions concerning the conception, diffusion, and reception of the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy, applied ethics, and political economy. A connecting thread across this work is the question of what constituted a liberal education and how arguments for it were developed, contested, and instituted.  

Current Research

My second book, The Wise Club: Origins of Common Sense in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 1758-1773, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It reconstructs the collaborative intellectual culture in which the Scottish philosophy of common sense first emerged in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society between 1758 and 1773. Rather than attributing this school of thought to a single founder, the book traces how David Skene, John Gregory, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie developed distinct yet compatible lines of enquiry across different branches of knowledge through a disciplined culture of inquiry. Their collective commitment to an inductive investigation of the original faculties of the human mind extended common sense beyond epistemology to natural history, medicine, rhetoric, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and imaginative literature. Drawing on unpublished discourses, abstracted discussions, lecture notes, and correspondence, it situates the Wise Club in a formative context that produced canonical works of the Scottish Enlightenment and reinterprets common sense philosophy as a characteristic method of inquiry rather than a unified doctrinal system.

Beyond this, two large-scale book projects extend my work on the globalisation of Scottish Enlightenment thought.

The first, 'Race in the American Enlightenment', examines how ideas of racial difference were formed, contested, and institutionalised in American intellectual culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It develops the arguments of my articles 'Becoming White in the American Enlightenment' (2024) and 'Witherspoon and Beattie on the Philosophy of Common Sense Abolitionism' (2025) into a full-length study, and considers how Scottish philosophical accounts of human nature were adapted, and in some cases inverted, by American moralists and educators across the colleges, pulpits, print culture, and philosophical societies of the early republic.

The second, 'Scotland's Imperial Enlightenment', triangulates the knowledge economy among Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and Bengal between 1780 and 1832. Working across the archives of these three linked sites of the British imperial world, it examines how Scottish philosophical and educational practices were transmitted, adapted, and contested, and what the comparison reveals about the reach of Scottish Enlightenment thought during its supposed decline.

Building on a podcast series that I coordinated, my co-edited volume with Michael Brown, Foundations and Disruptions: A New History of Aberdeen University, is forthcoming with Aberdeen University Press in 2027. It explores the University's transnational transmission of ideas since the foundation of King's.

Past Research

My monograph, Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind, published by Oxford University Press in August 2022, sets forth a new understanding of the late Scottish Enlightenment in its transatlantic contexts. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change in Scottish intellectual culture and within a globalising knowledge economy between 1772 and 1828. Seminal works in this field identify continuity of thought in the 'spirit' of a distinctive Scottish school of philosophy and a cross-generational 'democratic intellect' that took shape through the Scottish philosophical tradition in higher education. However, the legacy of Scottish philosophy in nineteenth-century education is largely misunderstood due to the scholarly marginalisation of Stewart's educational doctrine. My book argues that Stewart's novel and historically significant systematic approach to lifelong education democratised the Scottish Enlightenment pattern of philosophical thinking in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and reformed the moral economy of the British imperial world.

My edited volume, 'Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment', published by Oxford University Press in 2018, established a new understanding of the most influential philosophical system in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Teaching Responsibilities

Areas of PG Supervision

I welcome approaches from prospective postgraduate students with an interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish, British, American, Atlantic, Global, and Enlightenment History.