Stirling is first Scottish University to win £4m Leverhulme Award

Professor Sutton is a renowned cognitive philosopher who returns to Scotland after more than 30 years working in Australia.

He said: “It’s a thrill to return to Stirling – the city in which I was born – to take up this post as Scotland’s first Leverhulme International Professor. Our identities and our social and emotional lives are deeply shaped by place and memory. Better understanding of these complex topics requires us to integrate the concepts and methods of many fields. Leverhulme’s remarkable investment in new work that transcends disciplinary boundaries will support sustained research across the arts and sciences.

“The Centre will draw on cognitive theory, social sciences, and the humanities to break new ground in the study of spatial thinking, disorientation and remembering the past. Although it is anchored in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, it includes research from health, psychology, and disciplines across campus to explore topics such as memory, truth and the past, the impact of technology on our wayfinding abilities, and the challenges of engaging with places with painful or difficult pasts.”

Place and memory

Innovating in its mix of conceptual, experimental, and ethnographic approaches, the Centre’s mission is to implement an unprecedented intensity of interdisciplinary collaborative methods to advance knowledge of the dynamic relations between place and memory. In studying migration and belonging, commemoration, technologies of memory, or urban life and mental health, the Centre will advance knowledge of how people navigate together in space and time.

The Leverhulme International Professorships enable universities to attract leading scholars from around the world to take up permanent professorial posts in the UK. 

Professor Kirstie Blair, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the University of Stirling, said: “We’re delighted by John’s success, and that we’ll be hosting him and his team on this project at Stirling.

"The University is perfectly positioned both institutionally and geographically to lead ground-breaking new research on places and the past that fuses local, national, and global scales. The Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory will complement and expand existing concentrations of research excellence at Stirling, including in philosophy, sport, heritage, and dementia.”

Professor Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, said: "The Leverhulme Trust is thrilled to support Professor Sutton’s appointment to the University of Stirling. Addressing pressing questions about how people locate and orient themselves in space and time, we look forward to seeing the outputs from this new interdisciplinary centre."

About John Sutton

John Sutton is a cognitive philosopher who studies memory, skill, and collaboration. He worked for many years at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, in the Departments of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, and was recently visiting fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. He has published over 110 research papers that span philosophy, psychology, cognitive history, music and sport, and the cognitive humanities. Among his recent publications are coedited books on Collaborative Remembering (Oxford University Press) and Collaborative Embodied Performance: ecologies of skill (Bloomsbury). Sutton is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and he was inaugural President of the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

About the Leverhulme Trust

Since its foundation in 1925, the Leverhulme Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education, funding research projects, fellowships, studentships, bursaries and prizes; it operates across all academic disciplines, the intention being to support talented individuals as they realise their personal vision in research and professional training. Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £120 million a year.