Humanities of the Future: Perspectives from the Past and Present

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this essay collection which marks the 50th anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). Whilst the University’s own history is around ten times as long, fifty years is an appreciable time for a research institute to be operating in the current academic environment. Given this volume’s focus on ‘humanities of the future’ it is interesting to observe how IASH’s own future has been shaped by its past. In what, even by today’s standards, looks like an innovatively crossdisciplinary move, IASH was first proposed in 1968 by an extraordinary natural scientist and by a leading humanities scholar: Professor Conrad Hal Waddington (Professor of Animal Genetics) and Professor John MacQueen (Professor of Scottish Literature and Oral Tradition). The following year IASH was founded within the then Faculty of Arts at the University of Edinburgh and in 1970, IASH hosted its first fellows and supported its first conference: Scotland and the Enlightenment. The novelty of this proposal is indicated by the fact that IASH is still Scotland’s only Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and one of the oldest IASs in the world.