Ian Stewart

Historian

Biography

I am a historian of knowledge and ideas in western Europe during the modern period.

I am interested in the ways that cultural contexts have shaped ideas, and how ideas have shaped cultural contexts.

My work has primarily focused on the ideas of language, nation, and race from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, in the British and Irish Isles and France, but I have sought to place ideas within their wider European and international contexts.

In March 2025, Princeton University Press published my first monograph The Celts: A Modern History, which best illustrates my interests and approach. It was selected as a TLS and History Today Book of the Year for 2025.

At present, I am working on a new book for Princeton, currently titled Beyond Savagery and Civilization: Humboldt, Du Ponceau, and the Languages of the World, and researching the origins of the realisation that 'race' is a social myth.

I have taught across various British and French universities, including the LSE, QMUL, UCL, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Sciences Po, and am now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

A bibliography and links to my books and articles can be found elsewhere on this website.

My institutional webpage is here (https://crh.ehess.fr/index.php?10003) and you can email me at ian.stewart@ehess.fr

Books

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Princeton University Press, 2025

Edinburgh University Press, 2023

Cambridge University Press, 2026

Forthcoming:

Race, Empire and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1726-2026 (Edinburgh University Press), edited with Dr Simon Buck.

Academic Articles

If you lack institutional access please email me for a pdf.

‘Dugald Stewart and Racial Theory in the late Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming).

‘Sir James Mackintosh and the First Linguistic Survey of India, 1806-1811’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2025: Online First)

‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History 95:4 (2023), 808-846.

‘Adam Ferguson, Sir John Macpherson, and the French Revolution: New Evidence and Perspectives’, Scottish Historical Review CII, 3: No. 260 (2023), 367-393.

‘James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology’, Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte/History of Science and Humanities 46 (2023), 76-91.

‘Language and the National Past in Napoleonic France: Reassessing the Académie celtique, 1805-1813’, French History vol. 35 no. 2 (2021), 219-242.

‘William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy’, History of Science vol.58 no. 3 (2020), 275-300.

‘The Mother Tongue: Historical Study of the Celts and their Language(s) in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, Past & Present n. 243 (2019), 71-107.

‘E.E. Fournier d’Albe’s Fin de siècle: Science, Nationalism and Monistic Philosophy in Britain and Ireland’, Cultural & Social History vol. 14, no. 5 (2017), 599-620.

‘Of crofters, Celts and claymores: The Celtic Magazine and the Highland cultural nationalist movement, 1875-1888’, Historical Research vol. 89, no. 243 (2016), 88-113.

Book Chapters

‘Legacies of Slavery, Empire, and Race at the University of Edinburgh’, co-authored with Simon Buck, in Peter Larsen and Marketa Krisova (eds.), European University Legacies: Problematic Heritage and Contemporary Practice (University of Edinburgh Press, 2025).

‘Celticism and the Four Nations in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in N. Lloyd-Jones and M. Scull (eds.), Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis-) United Kingdom? (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018), pp. 135-59.