Died 2014
Thomas Crawford (1920–2014) was an influential Scottish literary scholar and a pioneering figure in the academic study of Scottish literature. He was educated at Dunfermline High School and the University of Edinburgh. After beginning his academic career in New Zealand at the University of Auckland, he returned to Scotland in 1965. He then held a position at the University of Aberdeen, first as a Senior Lecturer and later as a Reader in English, until his retirement in 1985. His 1960 book, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, is considered a landmark work that applied new critical methods to the work of Robert Burns.
In the field of Boswellian studies, Crawford edited the first volume of The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple, which was published in 1997 as part of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. He also authored Boswell, Burns and the French Revolution (1990).