Professor Tobias Kelly takes over as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) on 6 April 2026, following the retirement of Professor Lesley McAra. Professor Kelly will be the ninth Director of the Institute, which was established in 1969.
IASH promotes interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and social sciences at the University of Edinburgh. It provides an international, interdisciplinary and autonomous space for discussion and debate. Since its foundation, more than 1,500 scholars from 75 countries have held IASH Fellowships, as well as prime ministers, politicians, playwrights, novelists, journalists and community activists.
Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Science. He works at the intersection of anthropology, history and socio-legal studies. He has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites, but over last the last fifteen years he has increasingly focused on the UK in a global perspective. His interests include human rights documentation, the prohibition of torture, and freedom of conscience, and he has published widely on these topics. Running throughout his work has been an emphasis on the wider social and cultural significance of legal claims. Most recently he has started research on the history of private detectives, using their work to examine questions of privacy, freedom of information and techniques of investigation. Throughout, he has been deeply interested in the politics of different types of knowledge production, and his work has combined a range of sources, including ethnography, archival work, oral history, and the analysis of creative art. He has held various leadership roles across the University, including Head of Social Anthropology, Director of Research in the School of Social and Political Science, and as academic staff member on the University Court. Professor Kelly said:
I am both honoured and delighted to take up the role of Director of IASH. I very much look forward to working with the core IASH team and engaging with the wider and exceptionally stimulating intellectual community that the Institute brings together.
IASH is a place where ambitious ideas thrive. Its international reputation for innovative, interdisciplinary research is richly deserved, and its work has addressed many of the most pressing issues of our time. These commitments resonate strongly with my long-held belief in the intellectual life of the University as a public good—one that advances social justice and inclusion. I am firmly convinced that IASH occupies a crucial position within the University, energising intellectual collaboration across disciplines.
The Institute has long struck me as an immensely vibrant intellectual environment, attracting a diverse and inspiring community of scholars from Edinburgh and around the world. Its programme of visitors—international and wide-ranging—is central to its mission, and I have been continually inspired by the creativity and commitment of its Fellows. IASH also works in close partnership with colleagues from across the University, with the city of Edinburgh’s distinctive cultural institutions, and with centres of higher education globally. Through these relationships, I see IASH as a space that fosters research, shapes careers, and enables innovative collaboration that transcends disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
The vitality of the IASH community is a testament to the outstanding leadership that has guided it over almost six decades. On behalf of the University and the wider Institute, I would like to express my warmest thanks to Professor Lesley McAra for her exceptional leadership over the past four years. She leaves behind an Institute in excellent health and will be a very hard act to follow.
Lesley McAra is Professor of Penology in the Law School, and has served as Director since 2022, succeeding Professor Steve Yearley. Prior to taking the reins at IASH, she was the inaugural Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Lesley’s main research interests lie in the general areas of the sociology of punishment and the sociology of law and deviance, with a particular focus on juvenile justice and the aetiology of youth crime. For the past 28 years, she has been Co-Director of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, a longitudinal programme of research on pathways into and out of crime for a cohort of 4,300 young people. She has won the Howard League Research Medal (2013), the Chancellor’s Medal for research impact (2016), the ESRC prize for outstanding public policy impact (2019). A former President of the European Society of Criminology, Lesley was awarded a CBE for services to criminology in the 2018 New Year’s honours list and, in 2021, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Professor McAra said:
I am thrilled at the appointment of Professor Tobias Kelly to be the next Director of IASH. Institutes such as IASH have such a special role to play in supporting new generations of scholars, as places of sanctuary for academics facing persecution or war in their home countries, and as places for knowledge curation and exchange at a global level. Tobias brings a wealth of experience to this role. As we move towards IASH’s 60th birthday in 2030, I know that the Institute will go from strength to strength under his leadership. I offer him my warmest congratulations.