Professor Emeritus Sir Thomas Devine

Biography

Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography in the University of Edinburgh, the world’s oldest and most prestigious chair in the field. He has also  held professorial chairs at Aberdeen and Strathclyde, where he was also Deputy Principal of the latter in the 1990s.

He is the author or editor of over forty books, several of which have become international best sellers, especially The Scottish Nation which has sold over 100,000 copies to date in the UK alone and for a time even outsold the adventures of Harry Potter in Scotland for a time when first published!

His most recent book,The Scottish Clearances:A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 (Allen Lane:The Penguin Press), was published last year to glowing reviews in the UK press.
Professor Devine has a high media profile and contributes regularly to newspapers, social media, periodicals, radio and television both at home and abroad.

He has received many prizes, honorary degrees and accolades during his career. Most notably in 2001,with the Nobel Laureate,the late Sir James Black OM, inventor of beta blockers, he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotland’s supreme academic accolade, by HM The Queen on  the recommendation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2014 he was knighted ‘for services to the study of Scottish history’, the first historian of Scotland to be so honoured. Last summer, the Joint Committee of the Houses of Lords and Commons on History and Archives bestowed on him its Lfetime Achievement Award.

Sir Tom is the only UK-based humanities scholar to be elected to all three of the national academies in the British Isles for which he is eligible: Royal Society of Edinburgh(FRSE), Royal Irish Academy(HonMRIA) and the British Academy(FBA).

The Times Scotland noted in 2013 that ‘Tom Devine is as close to a national bard as the nation has’ while for Scottish Field,  September 2014, ‘Sir Tom Devine is the rock star of Caledonian historians.’