Nigel James Leask (born 1958) is a Scottish academic publishing on Romantic, Scottish, and Anglo-Indian literature, with special interest on British Empire, Orientalism, and travel writing. He has been Regius Professor of English language and literature at the University of Glasgow, since 2004.^[1][2][3]

He won the Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year award in 2010 for his book Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland. He is a fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Centenary Fellow of the English Association.^[1]

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He was born in 1958 and grew up in Stirlingshire. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge before taking up a position of Reader in Romantic literature at Cambridge University. He is married and has two daughters.^[1][2]

In 2004, he was appointed to Regius chair of English language and literature at University of Glasgow, and is Head of the School of Critical Studies, currently from 1 August 2010.^[3] He also held teaching appointments at the University of Bologna, Italy; University of Dundee, Scotland; and a visiting professorship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City. He has lectured widely in India, Europe, and Americas.^[1]

He published The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought, his first book, in 1988; subsequently, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire in 1992, and many others later.^[1]

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• The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought, 1988.
• British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, 1992.
• Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: From an Antique Land, 2002.
• Irish republicans and gothic Eleutherarchs: Pacific utopias in the writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone and Charles Brockden Brown, 2002.
• Darwin's Second Sun: Alexander von Humboldt and the Genesis of the Voyage of the Beagle, 2003.
• Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, 2004, co-edited with David Simpson and Peter De Bolla.
• Maurice, Thomas (1754–1824), oriental scholar and librarian, 2004.
• Burns, Wordsworth and the politics of vernacular poetry, 2005.
• Byron and the eastern Mediterranean: Childe Harold II and the polemic of Ottoman Greece, 2005.
• Travelling the Other Way: The travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1810) and romantic Orientalism, 2006.
• Kubla Khan and orientalism: the road to Xanadu revisited, 2006.
• Thomas Muir and the telegraph: radical cosmopolitanism in 1790s Scotland. History Workshop Journal, 2007.
• His Hero's Story': Dr Currie's Burns, Moore's Byron and Romantic Biography, 2008.
• Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland, 2009, co-edited with Phil Connel.
• Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland, 2010.
• Their Groves o' Sweet Myrtles': Robert Burns and the Scottish Colonial Experience, 2012.

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• Saltire Award - Scottish Research Book of the Year 2010.^[1][6]

• Professor Nigel Leask, Head of the University’s School of Critical Studies.
• The University of Glasgow have been awarded the funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council - The team include English literature professors Nigel Leask.
• Professor Nigel Leask from the University of Glasgow will visit Dundee to take part in English's Visiting Speaker Programme.
• Speakers - Nigel Leask