Tom Burns (1913-2001) was born in London and gained a degree in English from Bristol University in 1933. He served in the Friends Ambulance Unit between 1939 and 1945 and was a prisoner of war in Germany between 1941 and 1943. He came to the University of Edinburgh following a post as research assistant in the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning, which he had joined in 1945.

Tom’s first academic position at Edinburgh was in the Department of Social Study in 1949 as a research lecturer and subsequently reader, in what was then the Social Environment Research Centre (later to become the Social Sciences Research Centre.) His partner Rosemary was a social psychologist in the same department; another colleague at this time was Erving Goffman, whose PhD fieldwork was conducted between 1949 and 1951 on the Shetland island of Unst. Goffman did his PhD at the University of Chicago, completing his thesis, 'Communication Conduct in an Island Community' in 1953. He returned to Scotland as a visiting scholar and went on to develop the ideas from his thesis for the book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which was originally published by the Social Science Research Centre as Monograph No. 2 in 1956.

Tom conducted three studies in the 1950s as part of the research programme of the Social Science Research Centre; his book discussing this, The Management of Innovation, written with GM Stalker and published by Tavistock in London in 1961. Tom went on to become the first head of the new Sociology Department and was appointed to the Chair of Sociology in 1965, a post he held until his retirement in 1981; the first intake of students undertaking a degree in Sociology was 1964 (the first such degree in Scotland, a year ahead of Aberdeen).

This was not, however, the first time Sociology had been taught in the city of Edinburgh. Patrick Geddes and Victor Banford had much earlier – the 1890s - set up the Edinburgh School of Sociology, as the Edinburgh School for Promoting the Study of Ethical, Social and Economic Subjects. This ran from the Outlook Tower, formerly the Observatory on Castle Hill, and as well as attempting to put pressure on the University to have a lecturer in sociology (they failed!) – classes were run for students and local residents alike. Geddes also bought up old flats in the Old Town and turned them into student residences, taking inspiration from Octavia Hill's experiments in social housing in London. He believed very much in social theory and social reconstruction going hand-in-hand. (See Scott and Bromley, 2013).

Source: University of Edinburgh archives; also Frank Bechhofer and David McCrone, Founding Principals: Sociology at Edinburgh, March 2009. See also John Eldridge, 'Tom Burns and the Practice of Sociology'.