Professor Cairns Craig

Professor Cairns Craig
Professor Cairns Craig
Professor Cairns Craig

OBE, FBA, FRSE

The Glucksman Chair of Irish & Scottish Studies

About
Email Address
cairns.craig@abdn.ac.uk
Telephone Number
+44 (0)1224 273681
Office Address
HMF3 Humanity Manse Office Hours: Thursday 12pm - 1pm
School/Department
School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History

Biography

Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies, and is Director both of the second phase of the AHRC-funded Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies (2006-10). He rejoined the University of Aberdeen in 2005, having been a lecturer in the 1970s, after a long career in the University of Edinburgh, where he was Head of the English Literature Department 1997-2003, during the period when it achieved 5* rating in the Research Assessment Exercise. He was also Director for the Centre for the History of Ideas in Scotland.

He has published widely on Scottish and modernist literature, including Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982), Out of History : Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (1996), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). His most recent books are Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (2007) and Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (2009). He has also written an introduction to Iain Banks’s Complicity (2002).

He was general editor of the four volume History of Scottish Literature (1987-89) and general editor of the determinations series published by Edinburgh University Press from 1987 – 1997, which included titles such as Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull’s The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (1987), Alexander Broadie’s The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy, Christopher Harvie’s Cultural Weapons: Scotland and Survival in a New Europe, as well as Forward!: Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988, edited by Ian Donnachie, Christopher Harvie and Ian S. Wood; The Manufacture of Scottish History, edited by Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley; and Scotland’s Claim of Right, edited by Owen Dudley Edwards. He was also an editor of the Canongate Classics series, in which he published (with Randall Stevenson) An Anthology of Twentieth Century Scottish Drama.

He was on the editorial board of the influential arts magazine Cencrastus, from its founding in 1981 till 1987; he was an associate editor of Radical Scotland from 1988, and was the publisher of Edinburgh Review from 2001–05. Through Edinburgh Review he was responsible for publications such as Angela McSeveney’s Imprint, George Davie’s Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Peter Manson’s Adjunct: An Undigest.

He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 2001, of the British Academy since 2005 and was awarded an OBE for services to Literature and Education in 2007.

External Memberships

AHRC peer review panellist, British Academy grants officer.

Research

Research Overview

Irish-Scottish cultural relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries (MacPherson to Yeats in poetry, Sterne to Kelman in the novel, Hutcheson to MacIntyre in philosophy)

The ‘lyrical epic’ in modern poetry (Yeats to Muldoon)

Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Scottish thought (William Thomson, Peter Guthrie Tait, James Clerk Maxwell, John Ferguson McLennan, William Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer, Patrick Geddes, Edward Caird, Andrew Seth, John Laird, Norman Kemp Smith)

Contemporary Scottish writing (especially Iain Banks, A.L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner)

Scottish women writers of the inter-war period (Nan Shepherd, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Willa Muir).

Graduate students interested in working in any of these areas, or in connected areas, should contact him by email at cairns.craig@abdn.ac.uk.

 

Current Research

I am currently working on a book on Muriel Spark, a history of the Scottish novel since the eighteenth century, and a biography of the Scottish sociologist Robert Morrison  MacIver, who taught sociology in the University of Aberdeen before the First World War and who held professorships at the University of Toronto and at Columbia, New York. My work on MacIver is part of a project on 'Intellectual Migrants' run by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, and which is exploring the role of Scottish and Irish university graduates in the development of educational institutions in North America and in Australasia.

Publications

Page 1 of 1 Results 1 to 42 of 42

  • 525 Years in the Pursuit of Truth Podcast: The Influence of Prof. Herbert J.C. Grierson, 1866-1960

    Bow, C. (ed.), Craig, C.
    Non-textual Forms: Digital or Visual Products
  • Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death

    Craig, C.
    Edinburgh University Press. 232 pages
    Books and Reports: Books
  • The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Indpendence

    Craig, R. C.
    Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. 306 pages
    Books and Reports: Books
  • Botanic Gardens and the Aesthetics of Artifice

    Craig, C.
    Journal of Scottish Thought, vol. 9, pp. 95-109
    Contributions to Journals: Articles
  • James Robertson: In the Margins of History

    Craig, R. C.
    The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. Acheson, J. (ed.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 163-173, 10 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • The Art of Uncertainty: Forms of Omniscience in the Novels of Robin Jenkins

    Craig, R. C.
    The Fiction of Robin Jenkins: Some Kind of Grace. Brill Rodopi, pp. 67-89, 22 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Edwin Morgan's Poetry from Scotland

    Craig, C.
    The International Companion to Edwin Morgan. Riach, A. (ed.). Association of Scottish Literary Studies, pp. 59-86, 28 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Alexander Bain, Associationism and Scottish Philosophy

    Craig, C.
    Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Graham, G. (ed.). Oxford University Press, pp. 95-118, 24 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Herbert Grierson and the Making of Modern Poetry

    Craig, R. C.
    Vita Mea: The Autobiography of Herbert Grierson. Craig, C. (ed.). Aberdeen University Press, pp. vi-lxxxvii, 82 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • The modern scottish novel

    Craig, C.
    A Companion to British Literature. De Maria Jr., R., Chang, H., Zacher, S. (eds.). Wiley, pp. 404-423, 20 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Scotland's Migrant Philosophers and the History of Scottish Philosophy

    Craig, C.
    History of European Ideas, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 670-692
    Contributions to Journals: Articles
  • The Literary Tradition

    Craig, R. C.
    The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History. Devine, T., Wormald, J. (eds.). Oxford University Press, pp. 99-129, 31 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Empire of Intellect: The Scottish Enlightenment and Scotland’s Intellectual Migrants

    Craig, R. C.
    Scotland and the British Empire. MacKenzie, J. M., Devine, T. (eds.). Oxford University Press, pp. 84-117, 34 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Tradition and the individual editor: Professor Grierson, modernism and national poetics

    Craig, R. C.
    Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry. Mackay, P., Longley, E., Brearton, F. (eds.). Cambridge University Press, pp. 39-57, 19 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • The Scottish Novel

    Craig, R. C.
    Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. Parrinder, P., Gasiorek, A. (eds.). Oxford University Press
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Scottish Fiction

    Craig, R. C.
    The Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume 4: The Reinventiion of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. Parrinder, P., Gasoriek, A. (eds.). Oxford University Press, pp. 473-489, 17 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Kelman's Glasgow Sentence

    Craig, C.
    The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman. Hames, S. (ed.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 75-85, 11 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • The last Romantics: how the scholarship of Herbert Grierson influenced Modernist poetry

    Craig, R. C.
    TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, pp. 14-15
    Contributions to Specialist Publications: Articles
  • Otherworlds: Devolution and the Scottish novel

    Craig, C.
    The Cambridge Companion to: Scottish Literature. Carruthers, G., McIlvanney, L. (eds.). Cambridge University Press, pp. 261-274, 14 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Finlay, Ian Hamilton (1925–2006)

    Craig, R. C.
    Non-textual Forms: Web Publications and Websites
  • Scotland’s Fantastic Physics: Energy transformation in MacDonald, Stevenson, Barrie and Spark

    Craig, R. C.
    Scotland as Science Fiction. Bucknell University Press, pp. 15-28, 13 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Arcades: The Turning of the Nineteenth Century

    Craig, C.
    The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature. Brown, I., Riach, A. (eds.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 15-24, 10 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Kenneth White

    Craig, C.
    The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry. Nicholson, C., McGuire, M. (eds.). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 154 -171, 18 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment

    Craig, C.
    Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. 272 pages
    Books and Reports: Books
  • Modernism and National Identity in Scottish Magazines: The Evergreen (1895-7), Scottish Art and Letters (1944-50), The Scottish Chapbook (1922-3), The Northern Review (1924), The Scots Magazine (1924- ), The Modern Scot (1930-6), Outlook (1936-7), and The Voice of Scotland (1938-9, 1945, 1955)

    Craig, C.
    The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955. Brooker, P., Thacker, A. (eds.). Oxford University Press, pp. 759-784, 26 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Nostophobia

    Craig, C.
    Scottish Cinema Now. Murray, J., Farley, F., Stoneman, R. (eds.). Cambridge Scholars Pub., pp. 56-71, 16 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • The study of Scottish literature

    Craig, C.
    The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: From Columba to the Union (Until 1707). Edinburgh University Press, pp. 16-32, 17 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • 1979, Edinburgh and Glasgow: Devolution Deferred

    Craig, R. C.
    The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English; Edinburgh University Press; eds. McHale, B., Stevenson, R., pp. 217-228, 11 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Criticism of Scottish Literature

    Craig, R. C.
    Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol 3, pp. 42-52, 10 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Devolving the Scottish Novel

    Craig, R. C.
    A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed James English, pp. 121-140, 19 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature

    Craig, R. C.
    The Study of Scottish Literature, pp. 16-32, 16 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Nineteenth-Century Scottish Thought

    Craig, R. C.
    Edinburgh History of Scottish LIterature, Vol 2, pp. 267-276, 9 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • National Literature and Cultural Capital in Scotland and Ireland

    Craig, R. C.
    Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society 1700-2000, eds Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan, pp. 38-64, 26 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • 'Introduction', J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough

    Craig, R. C.
    Unknown Publisher, J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890 edn); Canongate. 20 pages
    Books and Reports: Books
  • Beyond Reason -- Hume, Seth, Macmurray and Scotland's Postmodernity

    Craig, R. C.
    Scotland in Theory, eds Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller (Rodopi, Amsterdam- New York), pp. 249-283, 34 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Coleridge, Hume, and the Chains of the Romantic Imagination

    Craig, R. C.
    Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, eds Davis, Duncan and Sorensen, pp. 20-37, 17 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Location and Dislocation: A Scottish Perspective

    Craig, R. C.
    The Promotion of Knowledge: Lectures ot Mark the Centenary of the British Academy 1902-2002, pp. 181-190, 9 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Scotland and Hybridity

    Craig, R. C.
    Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature eds. Carruthers, G and Goldie, D (Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York), pp. 229-253, 24 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Culture After Devolution

    Craig, R. C.
    Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons, pp. 39-43, 4 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Postcolonial Hybridity in Scotland and Ireland

    Craig, R. C.
    Ireland (Ulster) Sxcotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons, pp. 231-233, 2 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters
  • Iain Banks's Complicity: A Reader's Guide

    Craig, C.
    Continuum, New York. 92 pages
    Books and Reports: Books
  • Where is the Nation You Promised?: American Voice in Modern Scottish and Irish Poetry’

    Craig, R. C.
    Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value, pp. 185-208, 23 pages
    Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters

Refine

Books and Reports

Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings

Contributions to Journals

Contributions to Specialist Publications

Non-textual Forms