Professor Tom Nairn

  Professor Tom Nairn
  Visiting Professor
  Room: GH 5.06
  Phone: +44 (0) 141 548 4053
  Fax: +44 (0) 141 552 7857
  Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
  www: http://web.mac.com/tomnairn

MA with 1st Class Honours in Philosophy Edinburgh University, 1956. Later taught at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy, 1965-66; at the Hornsey College of Art, London (now University of Middlesex), 1967-1970, in ‘General Studies’ Department; in the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, 1972-76; then. after a period working as a journalist and TV researcher (mainly for Channel 4 and Scottish Television, Glasgow) went to be a researcher in Ernest Gellner’s Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Prague campus of the Central European University, 1994-95. Returned to Scotland and co-founded the Edinburgh University ‘Nationalism Studies’ course, in their Graduate School, 1995-1999. Visiting Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 2001; and then Innovation Professor in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity, at the Globalism Institute, Royal Melbourne College of Technology (RMIT) 2002 to the present. See here the web-site: www.rmit.edu.au/Globalism/ under ‘People’:

"Tom Nairn ’s contribution to studies of nationalism, and therefore his potential contribution to the Centre of Excellence, is difficult to overstate. Writing in the London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson stated that Nairn has been ‘for twenty years the dominant political philosopher of his country, and an influence on the ideas of the post-1968 generation all over Western Europe’. Tom Nairn is widely known for developing in the early 1960s what would later be named the Nairn -Anderson thesis on British decline, which is much-cited and commented upon, and has had a definitive influence upon studies of nationalism and politics in Britain and beyond. He is one of the four most widely cited authorities on nationalism in the world today, along with Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith and the late Ernest Gellner. His influential book The Break-up of Britain (1977) gained much attention for its prediction of the unsustainability of the United Kingdom state and its probable fragmentation into a number of different republics. This text has been central reference for the growing field of nationalism studies and is used in hundreds of university courses across the world. Where the Break-up of Britain refocused studies of nationalism and uneven development, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (1998) established the field of argument that civic and secular nationalism is a key feature of modernity and not an archaic reaction against it. It is part of his general contribution to fundamentally rethinking the place of ‘nationalism from below’. His much acclaimed book After Britain (2000) continued the argument of The Break-up of Britain, concentrating especially on Scotland and devolutionary politics, along with the structural tensions within Blairism. Through his analytical and translating work, he is credited, together with Perry Anderson, with introducing Antonio Gramsci’s work to Anglophone culture, especially the notion of ‘hegemony’, which has had a major influence on the field of political and cultural studies since."

Current Research