Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

It was a pleasure to meet Andrew Hass, Reader in Religious Studies at the University of Stirling, on a recent trip to Glasgow. Andrew has been at Stirling since 2003 after undertaking a PhD in Glasgow in the 1990s. Originally from Canada, Andrew discusses the concepts of home and belongingness and how we identify ourselves in a global context (e.g. ‘a citizen of the world’), prompting questions of nostalgia for one’s homeland. In Andrew’s case Scotland is a place that intellectually formed him. Andrew talks about his classic middle class upbringing and a childhood of stability and privilege in which there was no strong legacy of going to university, which he says was largely about bettering one’s parents’ standard of living. His father was an electrical contractor and Andrew discusses how he didn’t set out to have a career in academia. We talk at some length about the role of music. Andrew identifies the extent to which popular music evokes memories, such that we are immediately drawn back to a certain