The Institute is saddened to hear of the death of Professor R. Cairns Craig OBE FRSE, who served as Deputy Director of IASH from the late 1990s.
Cairns was an internationally respected scholar of Scottish and modernist literature, serving as Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen and previously of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was appointed Deputy Director in 1998 by Professor Peter Jones, then served under his successor, Professor John Frow. In 2005, he left IASH and the University of Edinburgh to take up his role at Aberdeen.
His works include Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He was also general editor of the four-volume series History of Scottish Literature (published between 1987 and 1989).