This Leverhulme-funded project, After the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1843, investigates Scottish intellectual culture during the crucial period of transition between the Enlightenment and the Victorian age. In light of much new work on the Enlightenment in Scotland, the project seeks to understand how intellectual concerns changed within the framework provided by the long-lasting legacy of its thinkers, teachers and institutions. It aims to understand the period after the Enlightenment on its own terms, avoiding the teleology of seeing it as a passage towards the Victorian period.

Based in the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews, the project brings together intellectual historians from both periods and challenges them to look more closely at what came in between. To fill this substantial gap in the historiography of Scottish intellectual life, it aims to pursue in detail what happened to three of the main pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment: natural philosophy, moral philosophy/political economy and religion.