During Jim Wyllie’s forty years at the University of Aberdeen, he has been a Lecturer (1979-1992), Senior Lecturer (1992-2002), and Reader (2002-present) in International Relations. He has supervised 25 successful Doctoral Candidates as well as numerous Master’s degree students while the Director of the MLitt/MSc Strategic Studies Programme. His past students have gone on to become senior public servants in the Foreign Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence, academics at leading universities, security officials in major international banks, and senior officers in the UK and abroad. His former Master’s degree student from 1995, Fraser Lovie, recalls: “For our generation of Strategic Studies students, having studied as undergraduates during the turmoil of the early 1990s, we wanted a postgraduate course that could help us begin to make sense of the emerging world order and consider the new challenges we were going to face in our preferred professional areas. Jim’s strategic studies course did just that - helping us begin to identify a new type of trans-national security challenge, query what power now meant after the demise of a superpower, and to reflect on whether history had really ended”. In addition to an extensive publication list, Jim Wyllie has lectured in over 13 countries and gives the annual “European Security” lecture at the Royal College of Defence in London. Over the past 40 years of work, he has become a reliable, dedicated, and supportive colleague to the students and staff within the Faculty. His passion and conviction towards teaching and supervising remained unaltered despite his recent knee surgery. The School of Social Science would like to give the most sincere thank you to Jim Wyllie for his irreplaceable personal and professional contributions to the University of Aberdeen.
Congratulations to Jim Wyllie for his 40 years of service at the University of Aberdeen!