Professor Susan Manning (1953–2013)

Professor Anthony La Vopa remembers Professor Susan Manning, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

Professor Susan Manning will be remembered for her achievements as Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities.

Professor Manning was one of the world’s leading exponents of English literature in the widest sense, and an international figure in the area of transatlantic studies.

Generations of postgraduate students have found their scholarship inspired and transformed by working with her and she was pivotal to the research culture of Edinburgh’s department of English Literature.

Professor Manning put IASH at the centre of things in so many ways. She made the Institute a leading entrepôt for the study of the European Enlightenments, especially the Atlantic Enlightenments, and widened its reach to make it a global research centre.

She had an immensely capacious intellect, a rare agility and empathy in engaging the ideas of others, and a critical acumen that enabled so many people to find new meanings in the words on the page.

She was not just a brilliant conversationalist in the usual sense; she opened your mind and, on the terms of equality essential to scholarly exchange, led it down new paths.

Notes

Professor Anthony La Vopa is an IASH Fellow and was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Institute between 2006 to 2007.

An extended version of this obituary will be published in the autumn edition of Bulletin.