He has held research fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Institut für Europäische Geschichte (Mainz),[2] Brasenose College (Oxford), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies (UCLA),[3] the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte (Göttingen), and the British Academy (London).
Hotson lectured at the University of Aberdeen prior to being elected a Tutorial Fellow in History at St Anne's College, Oxford in 2005.
[6] Since 2009, he has helped to pioneer the application of digital tools and methods to intellectual history by directing a series of collaborative research projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York, New York), Horizon 2020 (EU), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Packard Humanities Institute (Los Altos, California).
In 2011, he emerged as a prominent critic of the marketization of UK higher education in an article in the London Review of Books.
[10] He subsequently wrote extensively on the subject in the Times Higher Education[11] and elsewhere, co-founding with Sir Keith Thomas the Council for the Defence of British Universities,[12] of which he is a trustee.