Historian James Robertson looks at how Edinburgh earned its reputation as "City of Enlightenment" and "Athens of the North" and in what ways the meaning of this title has evolved since the 18th century.
Nicholas Phillipson lectured in History at Edinburgh from 1965 and retired from full-time employment in 2004. He was then appointed Honorary Research Fellow. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Yale, Tulsa, the Folger Library, Washington DC and the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat, Munich.
His research interests have focussed on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern and modern Scotland with a particular interest in the history of the Scottish enlightenment.
He was co-director of a Leverhulme-funded project on the Science of Man in Scotland. He was an associate editor of the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is one of the founder editors of a new journal Modern Intellectual History.
He is a past president of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society. His Adam Smith; An Enlightened Life is to be published by Penguin Press in August 2010.