Thomas Martin Devine - Biography#

Tom Devine is the author of c. 100 scholarly articles and author/editor of some 40 academic books. He graduated from the University of Strathclyde in 1968 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 the University of Strathclyde 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, which was formally inaugurated by President Mary McAleese of Ireland on St Andrew's Day 1999. Over the following five years, more than £2.5m was raised for the Centre's research programmes from AHRC, 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.

He was appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. He was Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology from 2008 to 2010 as well as Director of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies.

From 2003 to 2008 he was a member of the Leverhulme Trust Research Awards Advisory Committee. He holds Adjunct Professorships at the University of North Carolina and the University of Guelph, Canada. He 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.

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 received the OBE in 2005 and was knighted in 2014.