Allan Kennedy

I completed my PhD at the University of Stirling, graduating in 2012 with a thesis entitled 'The Civic Government of the Scottish Highlands during the Restoration, 1660-1688'.  After serving in a variety of teaching and research posts at the Universities of Stirling and Dundee, I joined the University of Manchester as Research Associate in September 2013.

Working closely with Professor Keith Brown, I am currently engaged in researching Scottish migration to England between 1603 (the union of the crowns) and 1762 (the appointment of the first Scottish prime minister), while also co-ordinating an AHRC-funded research network centred on this project.  We seek to understand how many Scots travelled to England in this period, where they went, what they did and why they left their home country.  But as well as simply tracing patterns of Scottish movement, we are also interested in exploring the extent of Scottish assimilation into English society with a view to testing how far the Scottish experience can be described as one of successful integration. 

Prior to beginning at Manchester, my research focused on state-formation in early-modern Britain, with a particular emphasis on the experience of peripheral societies, especially the Scottish Highlands, in this process.  My work has been published in a number of journals, books and magazines, and I have also written a monograph, entitled Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660-1688, published by Brill in April 2014, which won the Frank Watson Book Prize (2015) and was shortlisted for the Saltire Society History Book of the Year Award (2014).  I was also joint winner of the Emile Lousse Prize (2015) for my article 'Representing the Periphery: Highland Commissioners in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Parliament, c.1612-1702'.

I am currently working on two further research directions.  The first traces how some of the patterns outlined in my book developed during the 1690s and early 1700s, with a view to producing a peer-reviewed article.  The second is a pilot study which it is hoped will presage a longer-term research project aiming to survey the under-used court records of late-seventeenth-century Scotland in order to reconstruct patterns of criminality and criminal justice.