Edinburgh Lectures

Tom Nairn

Professor Tom Nairn is currently the Innovation Professor in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Globalism Institute at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), Australia. He was born in Freuchie, Fife in 1932 and is a graduate of Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. After graduating he studied at Oxford, Pisa and Dijon.

He returned to Scotland in the early seventies to participate in the national revival. After the defeat of the Home Rule referendum he worked in commercial television and published The Break-up of Britain (1988). He founded and taught at the “Nationalism Studies” course at the University of Edinburgh’s Graduate School. He left Scotland in 2000 to take up an invitation to teach in the School of Social and Political Inquiry of Monash University, Melbourne. In 2001 he moved to RMIT when the Globalisation Research Unit was being set up. Professor Nairn’s work continues in the field of globalisation and how the politics and culture of societies are remaking themselves in a more unified world.

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.

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