Tom Devine - Biography

Biography

Tom Devine was educated at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, from 1964 to 1968, and graduated with first class honours in Economic and Social History, followed by a PhD and D.Litt. He rose through the academic ranks from assistant lecturer to Reader, Professor, Head of Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He was Deputy Principal of the University from 1993 until 1997. In 1998 he accepted the Directorship of the world's first Centre of advanced research in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen (the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies), which was formally inaugurated by President Mary McAleese of Ireland on St Andrew's Day 1999. Over the following five years, over £2.5m were raised for the Centre's research programmes from AHRC - which led to the establishment of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, funded competitively over 2 phases, - the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, and a further £1.6m endowment gifted from the Glucksman family in the USA for a Research Chair in Irish and Scottish Studies, which Devine held as founding Professor until 2005.

In April 2005, he was appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, the world's oldest and most distinguished Chair of Scottish History, which he took up in January 2006. In 2008 he became Director of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at Edinburgh, established by an external endownment of £1 million st. by a leading Scottish fund manager and his family. This is reckoned to be the single largest private donation ever made to a UK university for the development of historical studies.Devine retired from the Fraser Chair in the summer of 2011 but returned to employment by invitation at the University of Edinburgh in January 2012 to a Personal Senior Research Chair of History which was especially founded for this purpose.

He is the author or editor of 34 books and close to 100 articles on topics as diverse as emigration, famine, identity, Scottish transatlantic commercial links, urban history, the economic history of Scotland, Empire, the Scottish Highlands, the Irish in Scotland, sectarianism, stability and protest in the 18th century nation,Scottish elites, the Anglo-Scottish Union, rural social history, the global impact of the Scottish people and comparative Irish and Scottish relationships. The Scottish Nation (1999) became an international bestseller, selling nearly 60,000 copies to date in the UK alone, and for a short period even outselling the adventures of Harry Potter in Scotland! Devine has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research (Hume Brown, Saltire and Henry Duncan Prize and Lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, elected 1992, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, elected 2001, and a Fellow of the British Academy,elected 1994: the only historian elected to all three of these national academies in the British Isles. Professor Devine holds the honorary degrees of D.Litt. from Queen's University Belfast and the University of Abertay Dundee and the honorary degree of D.Univ from Strathclyde. In 2006 was awarded the first John Aikenhead Medal for services to Scottish education by the Institute of Contemporary Scotland and in the same year Bell College (now part of the University of the West of Scotland) conferred on him an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to Scottish culture. In 2000 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotland's supreme academic accolade, by Queen Elizabeth II, the only historian winner to date, and in 2005 was appointed OBE in the New Years Honours List for 'services to Scottish history'.In 2012 Devine won the Senior Royal Society of Edinburgh/Beltane Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement and in that year too the Society's Inaugural Sir Walter Scott Senior Prize for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts. One of his recent books, Scotland's Empire 1600-1815 (2003) formed the basis of a six-part BBC2 series in 2005. He has a high media profile both at home and abroad, regularly contributing articles and comments to UK newspapers and often appearing on TV and radio historical and current affairs programmes.

Tom Devine was a member of the Research Awards Advisory Committee of the Leverhulme Trust from 2003 to 2009 (adviser on all history fellowship applications) and holds Adjunct Professorships at the East Carolina University and the University of Guelph, Canada.He was Acting Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology from 2008 to 2009 in the University of Edinburgh. Devine has also been a Trustee of the National Museums of Scotland and a Member of Council of the British Academy.