Rate My Professor Liam McIlvanney

Liam McIlvanney is the inaugural Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies and Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies in the Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. He holds degrees from the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford and previously taught at the University of Aberdeen. His academic career focuses on modern Scottish literature, the work of Robert Burns, literature of the Scottish diaspora, eighteenth-century Scottish literature, Ulster-Scots poetry, contemporary Scottish fiction, Scottish crime fiction, and creative writing, particularly crime fiction. McIlvanney has edited significant volumes including The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (2012, with Gerard Carruthers) and The Good of the Novel (2011, with Ray Ryan). He serves on the advisory board of Studies in Scottish Literature and as an international advisor to the Scottish Historical Review Trust. His scholarly publications include the award-winning monograph Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (2002), which received the Saltire First Book Award; chapters such as "The View from the Octagon: Robert Burns in New Zealand" (2024) in The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns and "Cancer of Empire: The Glasgow Novel Between the Wars" (2018) in British Literature in Transition, 1920-1940; and articles like "Scottish Poetry in the South Seas: John Barr at the Edge of the Map" (2017) in the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies.