Professor Emeritus Sir Thomas Martin Devine is the Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and  Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, the world’s oldest and most prestigious chair in the field. He has also held professorial chairs at Aberdeen and Strathclyde. Sir Tom has authored or edited over forty books of which several became international  bestsellers. This is especially the case with ‘The Scottish Nation’ which has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone and when first published, managed to outsell ‘Harry Potter’ in Scotland. His most recent book, ‘The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900’ was published last year to glowing reviews in the UK  press. Sir Tom has a high media profile and contributes regularly to newspapers, social media, periodicals, radio and television both at home and abroad. In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotland’s supreme academic accolade by  HM The Queen on the recommendation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2014, he was knighted ‘for services to the study of Scottish history’, the first historian of Scotland to be honoured so. Last summer, the Joint Committee of the Houses of Lords and Commons on History and Archives bestowed on him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Sir Tom is the only UK-based humanities scholar to be elected to all three of the national  academies in the British Isles for which he is eligible; the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), the Royal Irish Academy (HonMRIA) and the British Academy (FBA).The Times noted in 2013 that ‘Tom Devine is as close to a national bard as the nation has’.  

Events participated in:

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Disposseseed: Join Allan Little as he talks to historian Professor Sir Tom Devine about his latest book The Scottish Clearances, and explores the history of Scotland’s immigrant communities from World War Two to the present day. (2019)