[5] Notable former Fellows[6] include Marianne Boruch, William C. Dowling, Sébastien Fath, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Edward Mendelson, Garry Wills, and Charles W.J.

[9] The Institute, its Fellows and its building appear in three of Alexander McCall Smith's novels, and a Fellowship named after their heroine Isabel Dalhousie was founded in 2012.

[13] However, from the outset, IASH diverged significantly from its predecessors and was entirely devoted to scholarly integration, wanting to provide a bridge between the then sparingly connected arts faculties and the newly emerging social sciences.

In 1970, the first fellows were elected and expected to conduct their research and give lectures and seminars to attract outside interest, and, once their fellowship ended, to move on: a pragmatic approach from IASH’s cofounder, Professor MacQueen.

[14] During the ‘social turn’ of academia in the 1960s and 1970s, the variety of subjects at IASH and the elevated level of academic position allowed the Institute to capitalise on its interdisciplinarity.

Visiting speakers in the 1970s included Edwin Morgan, A. J. P. Taylor, Harriet Harvey Wood, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric Hobsbawm.

Built in the 1780s by John Simpson and Alexander Deans, 12 Buccleuch Place is a 4-storey tenement sporting a Roman Doric pilastered and corniced doorpiece to the front and a full height bowed bay window at the rear overlooking a garden.

1-5 Hope Park Square is an L-shaped tenement block of three storeys, created by combining five separate Victorian flats into a single building.

In 1902, author and critic Dame Rebecca West lived with her mother and sisters at 2 Hope Park Square[20] before moving to Buccleuch Place to attend George Watson’s Ladies College.

It was a little box-like square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews.

[24] The small functional programming language Hope was developed on the premises around 1978 by Rod Burstall, David MacQueen and Don Sannella.