Dr Charlotte Lauder
Postdoctoral Fellow, November 2024 - January 2025
Charlotte is a cultural historian of modern Scotland with an interest in printed and literary representations of Scottish national identity since 1800. Following completion of a PhD on Scottish magazines at the University of Strathclyde in 2023, she was appointed Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Stirling until July 2024. Her work has been published in Victorian Periodicals Review and Scottish Literary Review, and featured on BBC Scotland News, BBC Radio Scotland, and STV News. She is currently working on two books, both to be published by Edinburgh University Press: a monograph based on her PhD thesis, and a co-authored monograph with former IASH Fellow Dr Lois Burke on children's manuscript magazines made in the UK and USA between 1800 and 1950.
Charlotte's first contact with IASH was as a History undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh in 2017 when she completed her final year dissertation on the origins and development of IASH between 1969 and 1970. This led to an article that was published in History of Universities in 2018 and a lecture that was delivered in 2020 to celebrate IASH's 50th anniversary which can be heard here. During her postdoctoral fellowship at IASH she will build on this previous work by considering the historical and contemporary contributions of other institutes of advanced study in the UK and Ireland since the 1970s.
Project title: Institutes for Advanced Study: Past, Present and Future
Institutes for advanced study are independently-funded institutions that are designed to accommodate visiting academics – commonly known as Fellows – in order to conduct their own research. The first Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was opened in Princeton in 1930. Described by its founding director, Abraham Flexner, as ‘an educational Utopia’, the IAS has hosted well-known researchers such as John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Hetty Goldman, and Albert Einstein since its creation. IASs that were established shortly after Princeton include the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS), which was proposed in 1940 by the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, as a national institute for the educational, cultural, and political benefit of Ireland. Other IASs have emerged from an amalgamation of older institutions, such as the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London which opened in 1995 and incorporates constituent institutes such as the older Institute of Historical Research (founded in 1921) and the newer Institute of Philosophy (founded in 2005). Elsewhere in the UK, a unique example in the history of IASs is the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), being an institute for advanced study that is solely dedicated to a specific discipline, the humanities. Since 1970, IASH has hosted Fellows from around the world who have contributed to public life in Scotland and in 2025 IASH celebrates its 55th anniversary. This project is dedicated to exploring the contributions of IASs like IASH and SAS to higher education since 1970 and to exploring what contributions and concerns might lie in the future.