525 Years in the Pursuit of Truth: A New History of The University of Aberdeen University of Aberdeen

For 525 years, the historic libraries, archives and museum of the University of Aberdeen have been enriched by donations, gifts and acquisitions leading to collections which are now of international significance. As a curator of that historic material, Jane Pirie identifies key donors and figures involved in the care and formation of collections from the founding of King’s and Marischal Colleges through to their union in the University of Aberdeen.

This podcast focuses on the career of one of the University’s major benefactors at the turn of the twentieth Century, its Forres-born Chancellor Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona from 1897. It traces his connection to the University and then tracks back, looking at how he acquired wealth and prestige at the heart of the transition in British North America from a fur trading empire to a settler-dominated confederation. It contributes to the consideration of legacies of empire in and beyond the University today by emphasising the need to take account of the multifaceted nature of empire itself.  

In this year of the 525th anniversary of the University of Aberdeen, its Department of Economics is also celebrating an anniversary – the centenary of the Jaffrey Chair in Political Economy. This podcast by Economics Professor Keith Bender highlights the life of Sir Thomas Jaffrey Bt, the early 20th century Aberdonian banker and philanthropist who endowed the Chair, and explores the history of the Department of Economics through the seven people who have held the Chair.

Cairns Craig, Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies, recounts the influence of the first holder of the chair in English Literature at Aberdeen University, Professor H.J.C. Grierson. Grierson was closely involved with major poets of the early twentieth century, such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, because of the influence of his edition of the poems of John Donne (OUP, 1912), which set the standard for the critical analysis of poetry for next half century.

This podcast explores the life and influence of the Rev. James Ramsay, an Anglican priest, ship’s surgeon, and pioneering abolitionist who was educated at King’s College between 1749 and 1753.

In 1773 James Beattie, professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen, visited London to petition (successfully) for a royal pension on the back of his sudden fame as author of An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, In Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770), an attack on the ‘infidelity’ of the times, and the writings of David Hume in particular. Beattie’s philosophy and poetry sheds light not only on the debates that animated King’s and Marischal colleges in the eighteenth century, but also on the role of the Aberdeen Enlightenment in the development of Romanticism in Scotland and beyond.