Thomas Cunningham Nairn (2 June 1932 – 21 January 2023) was a Scottish political theorist and academic. He was an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. He was known as an essayist and a supporter of Scottish independence. Early life Nairn was born on 2 June 1932 in Freuchie, Fife, the son of a primary school headmaster. He attended Dunfermline High School and the Edinburgh College of Art before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an MA in Philosophy in 1956. He was awarded a British Council scholarship in 1957 to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he stayed for some time. As well as becoming fluent in Italian, it was during this sojourn that he began to transcend the limits of orthodox Marxism, particularly while exploring the writings of Antonio Gramsci. "If you were a Marxist [in Britain] you were a Stalinist or a Trotskyist," he later explained, "but I was insulated against that by my Italian experience... there was a much wider intellectual, cultural atmosphere that one could go on breathing." During the 1960s Nairn studied at the University of Dijon (now the University of Burgundy), worked in warehouses as a nightwatchman, and taught at various institutions including the University of Birmingham (1965–66). Nairn came to national prominence as a lecturer at Hornsey College of Art during 1968, where he became involved in a student occupation. The occupation offered a major critique of the education system at the time. After the authorities regained control, he was dismissed. He was then absent from secure university posts for three decades. He was at the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, from 1972 to 1976, but resigned when his efforts to steer it towards becoming a pan-European thinktank failed. He then worked on and off as a journalist and TV researcher (mainly for Channel 4 and Scottish Television, Glasgow) before a year at the Central European University with Ernest Gellner (1994–95) and then setting up and running a Masters course on Nationalism at the University of Edinburgh (1995–99). In 2001 he was invited to take up an Innovation Professorship in Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and worked with Paul James. He left in January 2010 when in his late 70s. Returning to France and then Britain, he was fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of