Aidôs:The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993)
Douglas Laidlaw Cairns (born 10 January 1961) is a Scottish classicist. Since 2004,he has served as Professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in the study of Greek society,ethics,literature,emotional life,and the ways in which these are reflected in Greek epic,tragedy,and lyric poetry.
Cairns' work incorporated psychological,anthropological and behavioural research into the study of Greek philology.[8] Significantly,Cairns' work challenged the prominent anthropological dichotomy between 'shame cultures' and 'guilt cultures' which had become central to the scholarship of Hellenists like E. R. Dodds and A. W. H. Adkins,and he went far in arguing that Ancient Greece was not,as had often been claimed,a 'shame culture'.[9] In recent years,Cairns has become a field-leading researcher in the use of conceptual metaphor theory as applied to classical texts,and his work has been described as "one of the first moments of serious engagement with conceptual metaphor in Homeric studies".[10][11]
Cairns has held research fellowships at Georg-August Universität,Humboldt Universität,Technische Universität Dresden,won a major research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust,and a senior research fellowship from the ERC/Oxford University Project "The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions".[5] He directed the AHRC-funded project "A History of Distributed Cognition"[13] and the Leverhulme Trust International Research Network's "Emotions through Time".[14][15] He is currently director of the ERC AdG Project 'Honour in Classical Greece'.[5][16]
Cairns was a signatory to a series of letters addressed to Principal of Edinburgh University,Peter Mathesion,by various members of university staff (including Sir Tom Devine) who were opposed to the renaming of David Hume Tower.[23][24][25] The renaming followed a small student campaign.[26] Cairns,writing for the Scottish Review,has argued that "Symbolic gestures such as the renaming of buildings in themselves do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of racism,xenophobia,and inequality that beset our society,and there is a real danger that they may in fact serve as cover for the absence of any genuine attempt to do so."[27]
Selected works
Books
Sophocles:Antigone (London:Bloomsbury,2016)
Bacchylides:Five Epinician Odes (3,5,9,11 and 13) (Cambridge:Francis Cairns Publications Ltd,2010)
Aidôs:The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford:Oxford University Press,1993)
Edited volumes
A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (London:Bloomsbury,2019)
(with M J Anderson and M Sprevak),Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press,2018)
(with D P Nelis),Emotions in the Classical World:Methods,Approaches,and Directions (Stuttgart:Steiner,2017)
Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought (Swansea:Classical Press of Wales,2013)
(with V Liapis),Dionysalexandros:Essays on Aeschylus and his Fellow Tragedians in Honour of Alexander F Garvie (Swansea:Classical Press of Wales,2006)
(with R A Knox),Law,Rhetoric,and Comedy in Classical Athens:Essays in Honour of Douglas M MacDowell (Swansea:Classical Press of Wales,2004)
Oxford Readings in Homer's Iliad (Oxford:Oxford University Press,2001)
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