[5][1][6][7] His thesis was supervised by Douglas MacDowell (then Professor of Greek), and Aeschylus scholar Alexander Garvie.

Cairns' work incorporated psychological, anthropological and behavioral research into the study of Greek philology.

[1] He directed the AHRC-funded project "A History of Distributed Cognition"[12] and the Leverhulme Trust International Research Network's "Emotions through Time".

[1] He is a Fellow of the British Academy,[16][17] the Royal Society of Edinburgh[18][19] a Member of the Academia Europaea,[20] and a recipient of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

[25] Cairns, writing for the Scottish Review, has argued that "Symbolic gestures such as the renaming of buildings in themselves do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of racism, xenophobia, and inequality that beset our society, and there is a real danger that they may in fact serve as cover for the absence of any genuine attempt to do so.