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Gerry Hassan is Research Fellow in contemporary Scottish history at the Department of History at Dundee University.
Gerry has previously been Research Fellow at the University of the West of Scotland, where he completed his PhD on the characteristics and role of the public sphere in Scotland and was subsequently Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland.
He has written and edited over two dozen books on Scottish and British politics, wider issues of social change and agency and how you imagine and shape the future of society. These include his academic study of the public sphere, Independence of the Scottish Mind (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). Other books as author or co-author include Scotland the Bold (Freight Books 2016), Caledonian Dreaming: The Quest for a Different Scotland (Luath Press 2014), The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (Edinburgh University Press 2012); Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation (Demos 2005) and The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination (Demos 2007), both achieved major Scottish and international influence; and two guides to the Scottish political class of MPs, MSPs and MEPs: The Political Guide to Modern Scotland (Politico’s Publishing 2004) and The Almanac of Scottish Politics (Politico’s Publishing 2001).
He has been editor and co-editor of numerous books including A Nation Changed? The SNP and Scotland Ten Years On (Luath Press 2017), Scotland, the UK and Brexit: A Guide to the Future (Luath Press/IPPR 2017), SNP Leaders (Biteback Publishing 2016), Scotland’s Referendum and the Media: National and International Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press 2016), After Independence (Luath Press 2013), The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power (Edinburgh University Press 2009), After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade (Lawrence and Wishart 2006), The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions, Ideas (Edinburgh University Press 2004), Anatomy of the New Scotland (Mainstream 2002), Tomorrow’s Scotland (Lawrence and Wishart 2002), The New Scottish Politics: The First Year of the Scottish Parliament and Beyond (The Stationery Office 2000) and A Guide to the Scottish Parliament (HMSO 1999).
Current and future research include a study of the 2017 UK election to be published in the forthcoming The British General Election of 2017, an examination of the discipline of contemporary Scottish history, addressing the role of recent political events such as the 2014 independence referendum in historical and contemporary context and work on the Britishness of the Labour Party.
Gerry has worked with, and advised, a range of bodies from the Scottish Government, public bodies and the voluntary sector. He has a background and commitment to developing public spaces, deliberation and participation, and produced the Changin' Scotland series of residential weekends which ran twice a year from 2002–15 at the Ceilidh Place, Ullapool, and has been director of Imagination: Scotland’s Festival of Ideas since 2014.
He also writes and comments widely in the media, regularly contributing to OpenDemocracy, and has a longstanding relationship with the journals Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy and Soundings: A Journal of Culture and Ideas.