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Professor Colin Kidd

MA (Cambridge), DPhil (Oxford), FRHistS, FSAScot, FRSE, FBA

Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought

Chair of School Research Committee

Tel. +44 (0)28 9097 3735

E-mail: c.kidd@qub.ac.uk

Office: 15UQ.202

 

Professor Colin Craig Kidd is a historian specialising in American and Scottish history.

Colin Kidd was brought up in Scotland and took his first degree at Cambridge. He held a Visiting Choate Fellowship at Harvard University in 1985-6, and from 1987 to 1994 held Prize and Post-Doctoral Fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1994 he moved to the University of Glasgow, where from 2003 he held the Chair of Modern History. He was a Visiting Professor at Paris VII in 2010, and has held a Fifty-pound Fellowship of All Souls College since 2005. In 2002 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2010 to a Fellowship of the British Academy. He contributes regularly to the London Review of Books. In 2006 he delivered the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford, and in 2009 gave two Chichele Lectures at All Souls. Prof Kidd joins the School of History and Anthropology in September 2010.  

Research Interests

Colin Kidd takes an interest in a wide variety of topics, largely in the period between the late seventeenth century and the present. He has a long-standing interest in the British Question, namely the relationships of the four nations of these islands with each other as well as with the idea of Britishness. He also has a wider engagement with themes of nationhood, ethnicity and race. The Enlightenment is another enduring research theme, especially its religious dimensions. More recently, he has developed interests in constitutional theory, both British and American, and in the history of anthropology. He welcomes postgraduate students in all of these fields, as well as in related areas.

Select Publications

Books:

Articles and chapters:

  • 'Wales, the enlightenment and the new British history', Welsh History Review, 25 (2010).
  • 'The Scottish Enlightenment and the supernatural', in L. Henderson (ed.), Fantastical imaginations: the supernatural in Scottish history and culture (Edinburgh, 2009)
  • 'Northern antiquity: the ethnology of liberty in eighteenth-century Europe', in K. Haakonssen and H. Horstboll (eds), Northern antiquitiesand national identities (Copenhagen, 2008)