President

Dr Iain Gordon Brown, FRSE, FSA, is Principal Curator of Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, where he is responsible for (among other areas of the collections) material relating to Walter Scott and his world. Over the course of a long career he has made many important acquisitions for the nation in this and other fields.
 
Born in South Africa to a Chartered Accountant father and a mother who read English at the University of Edinburgh under teachers such as the Scott scholar Arthur Melville Clark, he came to Edinburgh as a child. George Watson's College was the only Edinburgh school that his father had heard of in South Africa, and there he was sent. Classics and archaeology were his great boyhood interests. He subsequently read History at Edinburgh University and took a Ph D at St John's College, Cambridge, his thesis being on Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and the world of eighteenth-century virtuosoship.
 
Iain joined the staff of the National Library in 1977. As a scholar he has published extremely widely, much of his academic work being on topics connected with British art and architecture of the eighteenth century (notably on Allan Ramsay and Robert Adam); antiquarianism and taste; the history of British travel abroad, especially in Italy; and the literature and culture of the age of Walter Scott. He edited Scott's Interleaved Waverley Novels: an Introduction and Commentary (1987) and Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott: the Image and the Influence (2003). He has written some important articles on aspects of Scott collecting and scholarship. His involvement with exhibitions or projects for the National Library has led to publications such as The Hobby-Horscial Antiquary (on Scottish antiquarianism between 1630 and 1830); Poet and Painter: Allan Ramsay, Father and Son, 1684-1784; Building for Books: The Architectural Evolution of the Advocates' Library; Monumental Reputation: Robert Adam and the Emperor's Palace; The Todholes Aisle; Elegance and Entertainment in the New Town of Edinburgh; Witness to Rebellion (on the remarkable Jacobite drawings he discovered at Penicuik House); and Allan Ramsay and the Search for Horace's Villa. He has contributed to many volumes of essays, and to major works of reference such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1985 and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1997, he has been President of the Old Edinburgh Club since 2007, seeing it through its Centenary celebrations in 2008. He serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and frequently features on radio and television programmes. 
 
Iain is married to Dr Patricia Andrew, daughter of the distinguished physicist Professor E. Raymond Andrew, FRS. She herself is a well-known lecturer on art-historical subjects for the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh University, NADFAS, the Art Fund, etc. They live in Abercromby Place in the New Town.