معرفی
Professor Michael Brown is Chair in Irish, Scottish & Enlightenment History at the University of Aberdeen, where he is affiliated with the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History. He serves as Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). Awarded a Personal Chair in 2014, he has been a faculty member since 2006 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011.
He earned his BA (Mod) and PhD in History from Trinity College Dublin and has previously worked at Trinity College and University College Dublin. His academic memberships include serving as President (2022–2024) of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society and continuing membership on its committee.
Michael Brown’s research centers on the Irish and Scottish Enlightenment, with a focus on eighteenth-century political culture, intellectual history, and the interplay of religious, ethical, and literary ideas. His work is interdisciplinary and comparative, spanning British, Irish, and transnational contexts. He has authored influential monographs such as The Irish Enlightenment (2016), A Political Biography of John Toland (2011), and Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–1730 (2002), and has edited numerous collections on legal, religious, and radical history.
His recent publications reflect a sustained engagement with Enlightenment thought, Jacobitism, cultural memory, and political identity. He is currently working on a textbook titled A Cultural History of Europe, 1688–1914: The Birth of Modernity and editing The Routledge History of the Enlightenment with Karin Friedrich.
- FRHistS (Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)
Professor Brown has supervised 14 PhD students to completion and currently supervises 11 more, including projects on American philosophy, Sephardic-Jewish relations, Irish workhouses, and Enlightenment utopianism. He is the general editor of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies and a commissioning editor for the series Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution. He also convenes the course HI2020: The Birth of Modernity: Politics, Culture and Science in Europe, 1700–1870.
He is actively involved in research collaborations, editorial projects, and academic leadership, reflecting a sustained and influential presence in Enlightenment and Irish-Scottish studies.
