Three Scots academics honoured with prestigious fellowship

Three professors from the University of Glasgow and one from Edinburgh University are among a group of 76 international academics who have achieved the rare distinction of being elected Fellows of the British Academy.

University of Glasgow. Picture: Wikimedia

Professor Lynn Abrams, Professor Alexandra Shepard and Professor Hervé Moulin are today to receive the accolade, alongside Professor Douglas Cairns of the University of Edinburgh.

Fellows of the British Academy are leading minds in their academic fields and represent the very best of humanities and social sciences research, in the UK and globally.

Current Fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Sir Winston Churchill, CS Lewis, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.

This year marks the largest ever cohort of new Fellows elected for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, principal and vice-chancellor at the University of Glasgow, paid tribute to all three new Fellows. Professor Moulin of the Adam Smith Business School is being recognised for his contributions to cooperative game theory, mechanism design, and the theory of fair division have all been named fellows, while Prof Abrams is a specialist in modern gender relations in the modern history department and Prof Shephard is a professor of gender history. Prof Cairns is employed in the Classics department at the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Muscatelli said: “The University and I would like to offer our warmest congratulations to Professor Abrams, Professor Shepard and Professor Moulin on their election to the British Academy. It is the highest academic accolade for those working in the field of humanities and social sciences research. Their election as Fellows is testament to their outstanding scholarship and research.”

A total of 52 Fellows were elected from UK universities, with a further 20 Corresponding Fellows elected from universities in the US, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Italy and France.

Four Honorary Fellows have also been elected, including broadcaster Joan Bakewell and poet Tony Harrison, as well as Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority and Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books.