Professor Colin Craig Kidd MA, D.Phil, F.R.Hist.S, F.S.A.Scot, FRSE, is a historian specialising in American and Scottish history. He is currently Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at Queen's University Belfast, where he has worked since leaving the University of Glasgow in 2010.
Professor Kidd is holder of the prestigious British Petroleum Prize Lectureship in the Humanities and currently teaches in the department's division of Scottish History. He has held this position since 2003, and previous to which, held the post of Reader in the same department. He is a fellow of All Souls College Oxford and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, where he commentates on topics such as current affairs, economics and politics, as well as reviewing literary works. Kidd was an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before winning the Prize Fellowship at All Souls, Oxford University to complete his D.Phil. Kidd says he chose to become a historian after being inspired by the 18th century literature of Laurence Sterne. Prior to arriving in Belfast, Professor Kidd held fellowships at Glasgow, Oxford and Harvard Universities.
His own literary works include: "Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689-1830" (first published 1993); "British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800" (1999) "The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000" (2006) and "Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500-2000"(2008). All of these are published by Cambridge University Press.