Douglas Cairns

Douglas Laidlaw Cairns (born 1961) is a British classicist, Professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh, and the incumbent Chair of the Classical Association and Edinburgh University Press.

He specialises in the study of Greek society, ethics, literature, emotional life, and the ways in which these are reflected in Greek epic, tragedy, and lyric poetry.

Cairns was born in Glasgow in 1961, growing up on the Sandyhills estate.

His father was the local agent for the Co-operative Insurance Society and a prominent member of the local branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain, while his mother worked for the mobile unit of the Blood Transfusion Service.

Cairns was taught Greek and Latin at Eastbank Academy in Glasgow’s East End, one of the last state-maintained schools in Scotland to teach Latin.

Cairns graduated with a MA (Hons) in Classics from the University of Glasgow in 1983, and was awarded a PhD in Greek from Glasgow in December 1987 for a thesis on the Greek concept of aidōs, or "shame".

His PhD was supervised by Douglas MacDowell (the MacDowell Professor of Greek at the time), and Aeschylus scholar Alexander Garvie.

Cairns' work incorporated psychological, anthropological and behavioral research into the study of Greek philology, in a similar manner to scholars like E. R. Dodds.

He is a field-leading researcher in the use of conceptual metaphor theory in classical studies, and his work has been described as "one of the first moments of serious engagement with conceptual metaphor in Homeric studies".

Cairns held academic positions at the University of St Andrews, Georg-August Universität, University of Otago, University of Leeds, and the University of Glasgow before he took up the Chair of Classics at Edinburgh in 2004, serving as the Head of Classics from 2004 to 2005 and the Head of School from 2005 to 2008.

Cairns has held research fellowships at Georg-August Universität, Humboldt Universität, Technische Universität Dresden, won a major research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, and a senior research fellowship from the ERC/Oxford University Project "The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions".

He directed the AHRC-funded project "A History of Distributed Cognition" and the Leverhulme Trust International Research Network's "Emotions through Time".

He is currently director of the ERC AdG Project 'Honour in Classical Greece'.

He was Visiting Professor in Classics at Kyoto University, Japan (2008), the Peter A. Vlachos Lecturer in Classics at Colby College (2007), Margaret Heavey Lecturer in Classics at NUI Galway (2009), Platsis Symposiast at the University of Michigan (2009), George R. Langford Family Eminent Scholar Chair, Florida State University (2012), and the Visiting Professor in Classics at the University of Pisa (2017).

He has also taught at the University of Bologna (2013, 2017), International Christian University, Tokyo (2017), Tokyo University (2017), and Fu Jen University, Taiwan (2018).

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh a Member of the Academia Europaea, and a recipient of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Cairns was a signatory to a series of letters addressed to Principal of Edinburgh University, Peter Mathesion, by various members of university staff (including Sir Tom Devine) who were opposed to the renaming of David Hume Tower.

The renaming followed a small student campaign.

Cairns, writing for the Scottish Review, has argued that "Symbolic gestures such as the renaming of buildings in themselves do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of racism, xenophobia, and inequality that beset our society, and there is a real danger that they may in fact serve as cover for the absence of any genuine attempt to do so."