Institute for Advanced Study

IAS Distinguished Fellow Profile

Professor George Watson

IAS Distinguished Fellow 2006

Professor of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Emeritus Professor George Watson was formerly Professor of Irish Literature in English and Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey, another monograph on drama from Sophocles to Beckett, and has edited W.B.Yeats: Short Fiction and Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One. He was Director of the Yeats International School in Sligo between 1998 and 2000. He has also published numerous articles and chapters of books on a variety of literary subjects and is a reviewer for a number of journals, including the TLS and the Irish Literary Supplement. His current project is a book entitled The Ideology of Celticism 1760­–1914, in which he will examine Celticism as an ideological phenomenon of importance in the history of ideas in – especially­ – Ireland and Scotland, from the impact of Ossian to the outbreak of the Great War.