Michael was founding Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change in Edinburgh (2013-21) and from 2021 until 2025 served as elected General Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The Celtic myth is a recurrent theme across the peripheral nations of the United Kingdom, Brittany, Galicia and other parts of Spain, and beyond. In its current form, it is the product of the national revivals of the nineteenth century and has been highly contested. This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, examines the emergence of the Celtic theme, the various characteristics and values attached to Celticism and the practice of pan-Celticism in the past and present. Myth is used here not to mean falsity but to refer to a set of beliefs and practices whose importance is not defined by their empirical truth of falsity. In this sense, myth is by no means peculiar to the phenomenon of Celticism.
A book from this project will be published by Edinburgh University Press.
Nationalism and its accommodation across Britain and Ireland have often been seen through the lens of centre-periphery analysis, with London at the centre. The constitutional impasses concerning Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and even England, can no longer be understood purely in this way or as a crisis of the UK state. This project, including scholars from Scotland, Wales, England and both parts of Ireland, starts from the ‘islands’ approach pioneered by historians in the 1970s, focusing on the complexity of identities, horizontal as well as vertical links among sovereign and non-sovereign entities and constitutional visions in the wake of Brexit. The leaders are Paul Gillespie, Michael Keating and Nicola McEwen. An edited book is forthcoming.
The project produced and edited book:
PAUL GILLESPIE, MICHAEL KEATING AND NICOLA McEWEN, Political Change across Britain and Ireland, Edinburgh University Press: 2025
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