Tom Devine

Early life

Devine was born in Motherwell, Scotland. He was educated at the University of Strathclyde from 1964 to 1968, and graduated with first class honours in Economic and Social History, followed by a PhD and DLitt. 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 Strathclyde University from 1993 until 1997. He was appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh in 2005.

Irish and Scottish studies

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 was 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 given by the Glucksman family in the USA for a Research Chair in Irish and Scottish Studies, which Devine held as Founding Professor until 2005.

Published works

He is the author of close to 100 articles on topics as varied 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 Lowlands, Scottish elites, the Anglo-Scottish Union, rural social history, Caribbean slavery and Scotland, merchants in the China opium trade,tea and empire, English migrants in modern Scotland, the global impact of the Scottish people and comparative Irish and Scottish relationships.

Devine is the author or editor of some three dozen books, one of which The Scottish Nation (1999) became an international best-seller.The volume was listed first in the '100 Best Books to Build a Better Scotland' compiled by ListMuse.com and nearly two decades after publication remains the top-selling Scottish history title in Amazon UK.

Tom Devine is currently working on two projects: a single-authored book, Dispossession: A History of the Scottish Clearances, contracted to Allen Lane The Penguin Press, and a co-edited volume,The New Scots: Immigrant Communities since 1945, contracted to Edinburgh University Press.

Honours and awards

Devine has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research (Hume Brown, Saltire and Henry Duncan Prize Lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 1992), a Fellow of the British Academy (elected 1994), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (elected 2001): the only UK Humanities scholar elected to all three of the national academies in the British Isles for which he is eligible.

He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society(FRHistS), the Royal Society of Arts(FRSA) and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (FSAScot). Professor Devine holds the honorary degrees of DLitt from Queen's University Belfast and the University of Abertay Dundee, the honorary degree of DUniv from Strathclyde and the Honorary Fellowship of the University of the West of Scotland.

In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's supreme academic accolade, by Queen Elizabeth II (the only historian so honoured since the inauguration of these awards in 2000). Candidates for the Medal, in the words of the Royal Society, have to be 'outstandingly distinguished'.

Devine was appointed OBE in the 2005 New Years Honours List for "services to Scottish history". In 2006 he 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 2012 he won the Senior Royal Society of Edinburgh/Beltane Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement across all Disciplines and also the Society's Inaugural Sir Walter Scott Senior Prize for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts. He received the 2016 Wallace Award of the US-based American Scottish Foundation for his outstanding contributions to the building of ties between the United States and Scotland.

He was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for "services to the study of Scottish history", the first scholar to be so honoured for this reason.

Devine was listed in the Top Twenty of The Herald newspaper's 'Scotland's Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful and Influential People in Scotland' and was the highest placed member of a university on the list: 'The nation's preeminent historian, a towering and fearless intellect ... an academic tornado from early in his career (who has) reshaped the way the Scottish past is viewed' [The Herald, 30.11.2015]. He was nominated seventh in The Tablet ( the international Catholic journal) list of 'Top 100 Catholics in the UK' [The Herald, 14.05.2015; The Tablet, 15.05.2015]

When Sir Tom Devine retired from Edinburgh University in 2015 messages of congratulations were received from and read out at a public celebration of his career from the Prime Minister,David Cameron,Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown,the First Minister of Scotland and the Leaders of the UK Labour and Liberal Democratic parties.

In 2016 Edinburgh University Press published Global Migrations: The Scottish Diaspora since 1600, edited by Professors Angela McCarthy and John MacKenzie, as 'a tribute to Professor Sir Tom Devine FBA, the leading historian of modern Scotland and its diaspora'.

Lectures

Named Lectures presented over the last decade or so include: Post Office Lecture; Edinburgh Lecture; Trades House of Glasgow Lecture; Educational Institute of Scotland Lecture; Haldane Tait lecture; Annual Adam Smith Memorial Lecture, Kirkcaldy, 2013; Annual University of the Highlands and Islands Lecture; Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Memorial Lecture, Saltire Society; Prothero Lecture, Royal Historical Society; General Council Lecture, University of Edinburgh in Hong Kong; O'Donnell Lectures of the University of Wales; General Teaching Council for Scotland National Lecture; Royal Society of Edinburgh Annual Christmas Lecture; Royal Society of Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Prize Lecture; Royal Society of Edinburgh/Beltane Prize Lecture for Public Engagement; AB Emden Lecture, St Edmund Hall, Oxford; Margaret Harris Lecture on Religion, University of Dundee, 2013; Roy Paterson Memorial Lecture, 2013; St Mungo Lecture, Glasgow Cathedral, 2014; Road Ahead Prestige Lecture, Engineering Scotland, Strathclyde University, 2014; Stevenson Lecture on Citizenship, University of Glasgow, 2014; John Durkan Centenary Lecture, University of Glasgow, 2014; Sir John A Macdonald Bicentenary Lecture, Glasgow City Chambers, Canadian High Commission, 2015; The Clayton Lecture, Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 2015; T.C. Smout Annual Lecture, University of St Andrews, 2015; Tannahill Trust Lecture, University of Glasgow, 2016; British Academy Event, EIBF, 2016; National Library of Scotland Event, EIBF, 2016; Welsh Governance Centre, Cardiff University, Annual Lecture, 2016;Cardinal Thomas Winning Lecture,University of Glasgow,2017.

Devine regularly addresses sell-out audiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival;Previously...Scotland's History Festival;National Library of Scotland author events; and numerous bookfests and bookshops throughout the UK.

Edinburgh University and career

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 endowment of £1 million 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 finally retired from Edinburgh in summer 201 and is now Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography Emeritus in the University.

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 University of North Carolina and the University of Guelph, Canada. He was Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology from 2008 to 2010 in the University of Edinburgh. Devine has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of National Museums Scotland, a Member of Council of the British Academy and a Trustee of the Scottish Review of Books.

Present

Devine has a high media profile both at home and abroad, regularly contributing articles and comments in the press and often appearing on TV and radio in historical, cultural and current affairs programmes.He has written for the The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Scotsman, Sunday Herald, The Herald, TLS, The Tablet,Guardian, London Review of Books, The Independent, Scottish Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique,among others. One of his books, Scotland's Empire 1600–1815, formed the basis of a six-part BBC2 series in 2005. Tom Devine has made numerous appearances on BBC1, BBC 2, C4, STV, Radio Scotland, BBC Radio 4, RTE, CNN, Aust BC, Italian Radio, CBC.

Extended interviews with Tom Devine can be found at www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2014/07/25/4052776.htm and BBC Radio Scotland, Sunday Morning with ...10.00 am, 30/12/2016.

Devine was appointed to the advisory board of the European Association of History Educators – EUROCLIO in 2010.