Murray Pittock


Murray G. H. Pittock FRSE is a Scottish historian, Bradley Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow and Pro Vice Principal at the University, where he has served in senior roles including Dean and Vice Principal since 2008. He is currently engaged in leading on the Kelvin Hall development, the first phase of which was opened by the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and with other major projects on learning and teaching space and Glasgow's unique early career development programme. He has also acted as lead or co-lead for a range of national and International partnerships, including with the Smithsonian Institution, and plays a leading role in the University's engagement with government and the cultural and creative industries, organizing the 'Glasgow and Dublin: Creative Cities' summit in the British Embassy in Dublin in 2019 He also produced a major report on the impact of Robert Burns on the Scottish Economy for the Scottish Government in 2020; a Parliamentary debate was held at Holyrood on the recommendations. Outside the University, he serves on the Research Excellence Framework Institutional Environment Pilot Panel, and the National Trust for Scotland Board. He also serves as Scottish History Adviser to the NTS and as an adviser to a wide range of other national heritage bodies. He is President of the Edinburgh Walter Scott Club in 2019-20 and 2021-22.
Previously he was Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature and Deputy Head of Arts at the University of Manchester, becoming the first ever professor of Scottish Literature at an English university. He has also held visiting appointments at universities worldwide in Celtic Studies, English, History, Languages and Equality and Diversity including: New York University, Notre Dame, Charles University, Prague ; Trinity College, Dublin ; Auburn the University of Wales in advanced Welsh and Celtic studies and Yale. He has been invited as a visitor or to speak at half the world's leading universities, including Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and the Sorbonne.

Biography

Murray Pittock was born to Malcolm Pittock and Joan MacCormack. He grew up in Aberdeen, attended Aberdeen Grammar School, and studied at University of Glasgow aged 16.

Education and academia

Pittock received an M.A. from the University of Glasgow, then won the Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, Oxford where he completed his D.Phil. At Balliol he was Oxford University Debating Champion and a member of the British Isles Debating Team/ESU-USA Tour. He ran the Express Newspapers Scottish national debating competition in 1982–83 and has had a long media career with over 1600 appearances in some 50 countries. In 2014 he was described as 'Scotland's leading public intellectual'.
Pittock was appointed as a lecturer and then, reader, at the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and 1994, where he also had Faculty and University roles, including the corporate policy lead for the University's Scotland-related policies. He moved to Glasgow in 1996 to take up a chair in Literature at the University of Strathclyde, also serving as Head of Department, a member of the Governing Body and theme lead for Arts, Culture and Sport policy. In 2003 Pittock moved to the University of Manchester as Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature and worked on the changes needed for the merger with UMIST in Arts. He moved to Glasgow in 2007.

Academic work

Pittock's books deal with a variety of subjects including English, History, Irish Studies, Theology and Politics. His research includes groundbreaking books on the Jacobite literature and the Jacobite armies, and on the nature of national culture, the construction of Celtic identities and the existence and nature of a distinctive Scottish Romanticism. His work has appeared in Braille, Hebrew, Mandarin and Spanish as well as in English His study of Culloden was chosen as one of the ten best history books of the year by History Today and was recommended by Conservative MP Keith Simpson for reading by all non-Scottish MPs. In 2018, Pittock published the first ever scholarly edition of Robert Burns and James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in two volumes and a book which challenges the conventional dates for the Enlightenment and uses Smart City theory to explore the early modern city. He is currently working on The Global History of Scotland for Yale and acting as General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of Allan Ramsay, which received a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for 2018-23. In 2013, he planned and secured agreement for the development of a national graduate school of arts and humanities in Scotland. In 2014, he founded the first International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures, which has held or is planning a sequence of international Congresses, at Glasgow, Vancouver, Prague, Nottingham and Columbia SC.

Honors

Pittock is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has been awarded or shortlisted for numerous prizes. He is one of few academics to have given a prize lecture at both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, where he gave the Chatterton lecture in poetry in 2002. In 2011–13, he also convened the National Champions' Group, supporting the introduction and development of Scottish Studies in schools.

Publications