Neil McGuigan

Neil McGuigan is a historian with a particular focus on Scotland, Britain and Ireland before 1300. Thematically, he is most interested in political and social order, cultural encounters, kingship and succession, regionality, language and ethnicity, and the forces that underlie the use of myth (including historical writing, medieval and modern). He tends to navigate the lonely, desolate and forbidding wastes that separate the lush fields of the 'Celtic', the 'Anglo-Norman', the 'Anglo-Saxon' & the 'Viking', and those of the pre-1100 and post-1100. 

His previous research has concentrated on the politics and church of northern Britain c.800 to c.1200 and the twelfth-century sources for ‘Viking Age’ history, especially in relation to northern England and Scotland. In 2021, he published Máel Coluim III, 'Canmore': An Eleventh-Century Scottish King. The book subsequently won the international Frank Watson Book Prize, awarded in 2023 for the 'best book on Scottish History published in the previous two years'.

Neil McGuigan organizes and teaches the following modules for the School of History and the Combined Studies programme:

SC1901: Mediaeval Scotland, 1100–1513

SC1902: Celtic Civilization: History of the Celts from Brennus to Braveheart

ME2901: Introduction to Early Medieval Europe

ME2902: The Rise of Europe: Middle Ages, 1000–1500

SC3904: Dark Age Scotland - Northern Britain  before Macbeth

ME3906: Normans, Natives and Norsemen: Scotland c. 1050–1250

Medieval Scotland; Northumbria; the Canmore dynasty; Anglo-Norman Britain/Ireland; Viking Age Britain/Ireland; cultural contact & conflict; myth-making and the 'Past' in the Middle Ages.