Murray Pittock

Pittock giving Gresham Lecture on Charles Edward Stuart 2020

Murray G. H. Pittock MAE FRSE (born 5 January 1962) is a Scottish historian and literary scholar. He holds the position of Bradley Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow and serves as Pro Vice-Principal at the university, where he has occupied senior roles, including Dean and Vice-Principal, since 2008. He led the University's involvement in the Kelvin Hall redevelopment project in collaboration with the City of Glasgow and the National Library of Scotland (kelvinhall.org.uk), and since 2016 has chaired Glasgow's early career development programme, which has been considered influential across the sector.

Pittock has acted as lead or co-lead on various national and international partnerships, including with the Smithsonian Institution, and plays a significant role in the University of Glasgow's engagement with government and the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). He organised the 'Glasgow and Dublin: Creative Cities' summit at the British Embassy in Dublin in 2019, and contributed to the European network CIVIS through work on a European policy document concerning universities and civic engagement. He also delivered a masterclass on this topic at La Sapienza University.

In 2020, he authored a major report for the Scottish Government on the economic impact of Robert Burns, the findings of which were debated in the Scottish Parliament and have since been cited in policy discussions. In 2022, he was named Scotland's Knowledge Exchange Champion of the Year.

Beyond the University of Glasgow, Pittock served on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) Institutional Environment Pilot Panel from 2018 to 2022, and Investment Committee of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS). He also co-chairs the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance (SAHA) and chairs the Governance Board of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. He acts as Scottish History Adviser to the NTS and provides guidance to a range of national heritage bodies and the Scottish Parliament. He has recently advised both the Scottish and UK parliaments on matters related to the international promotion of Scotland and serves on the Scottish Government's Scottish Connections Advisory Panel on the diaspora.

Pittock is a member of the advisory board of NISE, a European research network comprising over 40 centres focused on national identities. He served as President of the Edinburgh Walter Scott Club in 2019–2020 and again in 2021–2022. He has delivered numerous distinguished lectures, including the Magnusson, MacCormack and Caledonian lectures.

Earlier in his career, Pittock was Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature and Deputy Head of Arts at the University of Manchester, where he became the first Professor of Scottish Literature appointed at an English university. He has held visiting positions globally in fields including Celtic Studies, English, History, Languages, and Equality and Diversity, at institutions such as Yale University (1998, 2000–01), the University of Wales (2002), Auburn University (2006), Trinity College Dublin (2008), Charles University in Prague (2010), the University of Notre Dame (2014), and New York University (2015). He has also been invited to speak at leading universities including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and the Sorbonne.

Education and academia

Pittock obtained an M.A. from the University of Glasgow before being awarded the Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. While at Balliol, he was the Oxford University Debating Champion (alongside Boris Johnson) and a member of the British Isles Debating Team/ESU-USA Tour. He also ran the Express Newspapers Scottish National Debating Competition in 1982–83. Pittock has had an extensive media career, with over 1,600 appearances in approximately 50 countries.

In 1989, Pittock was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, later becoming a reader in 1994. During his time at Edinburgh, he held several faculty and university-level roles, including serving as the corporate policy lead for Scotland-related institutional policies. In 1996, he moved to the University of Strathclyde, where he was appointed to a chair in Literature. He also served as Head of Department, a member of the Governing Body, and theme lead for Arts, Culture and Sport policy.

In 2003, Pittock joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature, contributing to the transition and restructuring process associated with the merger of the university with UMIST, particularly within the Faculty of Arts. He returned to the University of Glasgow in 2007.

Academic work

Pittock's scholarly output spans a wide range of disciplines, including English literature, history, art history, politics, and virtual/extended reality (VR/XR). His research includes pioneering work on Jacobite literature and military history, national culture, the construction of Celtic identities, and the development of a distinctive Scottish Romanticism. His publications have been translated into Braille, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Spanish, and he has appeared in global media over 2,000 times across 55 countries.

His book Culloden was selected by historian Jeremy Black as one of the ten "best history books of the year" in History Today, and it was recommended by Conservative MP Keith Simpson for all non-Scottish Members of Parliament. In 2018, Pittock published the first scholarly edition of The Scots Musical Museum by Robert Burns and James Johnson, in two volumes. That same year, he also released a work that challenges conventional periodisations of the Enlightenment, using Smart City theory to examine the early modern city.

In 2022, he published Scotland: The Global History with Yale University Press, which was named a Spectator Book of the Year among other accolades. As General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of Allan Ramsay, which received major funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018–2023), Pittock oversaw the completion of a 4,000-page critical edition, described by Eighteenth-Century Scotland as "groundbreaking" and "could hardly be surpassed". He is also a co-investigator on the £5.6 million Museums in the Metaverse Innovation Accelerator and has led approximately 20 funded research projects throughout his career.

In 2013, Pittock played a key role in planning and securing support for the establishment of a national graduate school for the arts and humanities in Scotland. The following year, he founded the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (IASSL), which has organised or is planning a sequence of international congresses: Glasgow (2014), Vancouver (2017), Prague (2022), Nottingham (2024), and Columbia, South Carolina (2027).

In November 2021, Pittock gave evidence on behalf of the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance (SAHA) to the Scottish Parliament's Europe Committee. He argued that Scotland's international image remained largely rooted in romanticised tropes of "castles, mountains, heather and whisky", with less recognition given to its contemporary identity as a centre of scientific innovation, progressive legislation, and digital and cultural development.

Honours

Pittock is a senior member of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies team that was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2023. He is the author of the only economic impact study of a single writer in the United Kingdom. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of Academia Europaea, and has been the recipient or finalist of various academic awards and honours.

He is among the few scholars to have delivered prize lectures at both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, having presented the Chatterton Lecture on Poetry at the latter in 2002. Between 2011 and 2013, he chaired the National Champions' Group, which supported the introduction and development of Scottish Studies in schools.

Pittock has featured in the media in more than 50 countries. He has been described by Stelios Rigopoulos as "Scotland's leading public intellectual", by Christopher Goulding as "probably Scotland's leading cultural commentator", and by Joan McAlpine and Edinburgh University Press as "Scotland's leading cultural historian".

Publications

• Allan Ramsay: The Evergreen (with James Caudle, 2024)
• Allan Ramsay: The Tea-Table Miscellany (with Brianna Robertson-Kirkland, 2023)
• Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present (2022)
• Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh's Civic Development, 1660–1750 (2018; reprinted 2019, 2022)
• The Scots Musical Museum (2 vols., 2018)
• Culloden (2016; reprinted 2017, 2022; Folio Society edition, 2021)
• The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (editor, 2014)
• The Road to Independence? Scotland in the Balance (2014)
• Material Culture and Sedition (2013)
• The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (editor, 2011)
• Robert Burns in Global Culture (editor, 2011)
• Loyalty and Identity (co-editor, 2010)
• The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: The Jacobite Army in 1745 (2009; revised edition, 2019)
• Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008; corrected edition, 2011)
• The Road to Independence? Scotland Since the Sixties (2008)
• James Boswell (2007)
• The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (editor, 2007; corrected edition, 2014)
• The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (co-editor, 2006)
• A New History of Scotland (2003)
• James Hogg: The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (2 vols., 2002–03)
• Scottish Nationality (2001)
• Celtic Identity and the British Image (1999)
• Jacobitism (1998)
• Inventing and Resisting Britain (1997)
• The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (1995)
• Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (1994; paperback edition, 2006)
• Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (1993; reissued 2014; paperback edition, 2016)
• Clio's Clavers (1992)
• The Invention of Scotland (1991; reissued 2014; paperback edition, 2016)

External links

• Centre for Robert Burns Studies
• Full text of doctoral thesis, "Decadence and the English tradition" via Oxford Research Archive