Research

The Centre (which was formerly called the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies) brings together around 70 researchers across the University of Edinburgh. Within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, members span a range of disciplines in Celtic and Scottish Studies, English and Scottish Literature, European Languages and Cultures, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian Studies.

Bringing together specialists in the fields of anglophone and francophone diasporas, this international network is unique in comparing the various diasporic communities’ responses to issues of identity, belonging and relocation in the specific contexts of British/French and Canadian immigration policies.

Edition is a collaborative initiative at the University of Edinburgh supporting new research in all aspects of the history of the book, from traditional forms of bibliography, codicology and textual editing to the latest theoretical and digital innovations. Launched in 2024, it continues the legacy of the Centre for the History of the Book (CHB) which was active at the University of Edinburgh between 1995 and 2020. Edition's website hosts selected CHB video and audio resources.​​​​​

Growing out of conversations started in a group on Emotionally Distressing Research, this is a forum for researchers experiencing the ‘pressure on thinking’ from the ethical dilemmas their research gives rise to. Involving researchers from across the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, including the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), it embeds ethical reflection in research culture and collaboration.

Based in English and Scottish Literature, but open to all colleagues, this informal group addresses research on poets, poetry, and poetic methods, across all historical periods. The group's focus takes in both literary critical and creative work through a series of research talks during semester time. Members are especially interested in the potential for cross-pollination between periods, languages, and disciplines, and in the relations between poetic theory and practice. 

This network aims to recover the forgotten history of Scottish children's literature. It was co-founded in 2016 by Sarah Dunnigan and Valentina Bold and has also involved graduate researchers from LLC and Edinburgh College of Art. In the decade since its foundation, SELCIE has collaborated with Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood on two exhibition-based projects showcasing its collection of over 15,000 books: Growing Up With Books (2018); and Nature Through Nurture (2025). The group has also hosted workshops, seminars and other events, including a symposium on Irish and Scottish Women Writers.

SWINC builds connections between researchers working in the field of 19th century Scottish studies and fosters public awareness of the richness and diversity of Scottish culture in the period. Founded in 2008, the network supports early career researchers, including current holders of ARHC Studentships and Marie-Curie Fellowships, and runs workshops, lectures and other events.

This monograph examines how post-war presidential history is portrayed in contemporary American fiction. Published by Edinburgh University Press (EUP) in December 2025, it is the culmination of Alexandra Lawrie’s research on post-2016 novels, many of which are discussed in a scholarly context for the first time. The novels chosen span a range of “watershed moments in American politics”, from the Watergate scandal to the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. Each chapter provides detailed close readings of the novels interwoven with the political contexts they evoke.

The book is part of EUP’s interdisciplinary series of New Perspectives on the American Presidency. It considers authors such as Colson Whitehead, Ben Lerner, A. M. Homes, Dana Spiotta, Jack Livings, and Nathan Hill. Lawrie has previously written about a number of these novelists in Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction (EUP, 2022), a study of novels profoundly shaped by a sense of historical consciousness. In that work, she looks at the idea of temporal slippage and ‘falling out of time’, as characters confront the past crises which exert pressure on their own contemporary present.

LLC researcher: Alexandra Lawrie

The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a number of devastating famines in British colonies, resulting in a huge body of literary and artistic work and journalistic debate around their ‘man-made’ nature. While the Irish literary case, for example, is relatively well known, the same cannot be said of literary-cultural responses to the Indian famines, including the 1943 crisis in Bengal. Over a number of projects, Dr Sourit Bhattacharya is recovering famine works, and administrative and periodical sources by Indian and British writers and critics, including influential Scots. A key aim is to maximise visibility of events that were much debated at the time, but are now rarely discussed, despite having influenced anticolonial mobilisation and postcolonial food crisis debates.

This body of work aims to catalyse extensive, long-term research that historicises contemporary debates on neo-colonialism and global food crisis, and indigenous responses to them. Outputs will include an online literary bibliography of the Bengal famine, annotations of major works, and a short film on famine survivors. The projects variously include archival fieldwork in Britain and India, and collaboration with an international team of researchers, library professionals, and curators to form a Network on the British Empire, Scotland, and Indian famines. The Network will host academic conferences in Edinburgh and Guwahati, an authors’ workshop and knowledge exchange programme in Edinburgh, and a public engagement event in Kolkata.

Running for almost three quarters of a century, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh edition was a major editorial project in Victorian studies. It was founded in the 1950s by C.R.Sanders of Duke University in the USA in co-operation with John Butt in Edinburgh, and was completed in 2023. In this timeframe, the project identified, edited, annotated and indexed over 10,000 surviving letters, mostly in manuscript, by prolific Scottish writers Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866). The core collections of these letters are in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library.  

The Carlyles corresponded with many of the outstanding cultural and political figures of their time in the UK, Europe and North America. The project has been recognised as instrumental in re-establishing its subjects as pivotal figures in our understanding of the 19th century. Between 1970 and 2023, the transatlantic editorial team produced 50 print volumes of letters, with publisher Duke University Press launching a free, searchable online archive of all the texts and notes in 2007. The editors also regularly published research papers and other publications, held a number of conferences, and contributed to the work of The Carlyle Society.

Founded in Scotland in 1993, Birds of Paradise is today one of the most successful disability-led theatre companies in the world. Drawing on her previous research, including her award-winning book on Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, Dr Hannah Simpson is working with the company to record its 30-year history, articulating their practice and ideology for the benefit of other theatre makers. The project’s main output will be a book published in the Palgrave Theatre and Disability series, released in multiple formats and shared with industry audiences in a series of events. Along the way, the researchers will contribute opinion and feature pieces to the industry and wider press.

As well as Bird of Paradise’s Robert Softley Gale (Artistic Director) and Máiri Taylor (Executive Director), the book is being co-edited by Judith Drake who has worked with the company over the course of her PhD on disability theatre in Scotland. In particular, Part One of the book - which explores Birds of Paradise’s production history - will capitalise on Drake’s work with the company archives, as well as an analysis of some of its particularly influential productions. The second part of the book will offer step-by-step, tried-and-tested practical guidance for other theatre companies, artists and venues. Aimed at developing their own accessible practice, the guidance will cover all aspects of the theatrical performance journey, from the rehearsal room to the auditorium. 

A unique exploration of the possibilities of big data for literary research, LitLong was a project to digitally map the ways in which Edinburgh has been used as a setting by myriad writers. Over two key phases, it mapped around 47,000 excerpts from more than a million books made available by the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the Hathi Trust, collectively spanning five centuries of writing. The project brought together researchers in literature, informatics and the digital humanities at three Scottish universities to text mine and analyse narratives. Its interactive map of literary Edinburgh had two visual interfaces: a website; and a free-to-download app.

For a number of years, LitLong was embedded in Edinburgh’s UNESCO City of Literature digital and on-site programming, with character-led walking tours being a particularly popular addition to the city’s cultural offer. Through foregrounding marginalised voices, including on Wikipedia, the project also inspired new work by over 80 of the city’s contemporary poets and prose writers whose work was published in the Umbrellas of Edinburgh anthology. Latterly, its methods have been adopted by Edinburgh International Book Festival and its partner Jalada Africa to map a series of transcontinental journeys and trace trajectories of African writing in English.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): January 2014 to March 2015; January 2017 to January 2018

LLC team: Professor James Loxley (Principal Investigator), Dr Beatrice Alex (Chancellor’s Fellow)

Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear bomb tests across the Republic of the Marshall Islands, forcing many communities into open-ended exile, including over 2,300 miles away in Hawaii. Led by Professor Michelle Keown (LLC) and Dr Shari Sabeti (Moray House School of Education and Sport), the Marshallese Arts Project (MAP) aimed to better understand the Marshallese experience of displacement, and to explore how strategies of resilience that remain within the community might be deployed to build educational and socioeconomic capacity in the future.

Collaborating with creative practitioners including Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Solomon Enos, the project team ran a series of participatory arts workshops with school-aged children to generate new understandings of the unique historical trajectories and community development needs of Marshall Islanders. Raising international awareness of the effects of America’s enduring nuclear legacy in the Pacific, the project has led to the publication of the first Marshallese graphic novel, a new antinuclear video performance poem, improved pedagogical approaches in participating and other schools, and an anthology of poetry by children who have demonstrated significant personal growth through MAP.

Funded by an ESRC/AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund award: November 2016 to April 2018; AHRC Follow-on Funding: December 2018 to March 2019; and an EPSRC Global Impact Accelerator Account: February 2019 to January 2020.

LLC team - Professor Michelle Keown (Principal Investigator)

Through two projects on the culture of finance – Picturing Finance and The History of Financial Advice – Professor Paul Crosthwaite's research has brought humanities approaches to bear on economic questions, helping us better understand the abstract, and often mystifying, domain of money, investment, credit and debt. Involving the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton, and galleries and other partners across the UK, the projects have used literary and cultural methodologies to explore the integral importance of visual culture to finance and to a critical questioning of some of its assumptions and practices.

Picturing Finance’s co-curated exhibition 'Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present' reached around 70,000 people, producing acclaimed new work by commissioned artists, and receiving excellent reviews from the public and media alike. Free digital resources from both projects, including an app, MOOC, and eight quality-accredited lesson plans, have improved financial literacy - a relatively new addition to the National Curriculum, and one that has rapidly increased in importance as Britain prepares to meet the twin economic challenges posed by Brexit and the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): March 2013 to September 2014; January 2016 to May 2019

LLC team - Professor Paul Crosthwaite (Co-Investigator)

When readers enjoy and engage actively with what they read, the positive effects can be profound and long lasting. However, in the last two decades, young people’s reading attitudes and practices have seen continued decline in reading for pleasure. As a (typically) short and ambiguous form of literature, poetry may offer a gateway into reading – drawing reluctant younger readers into a more active and expansive literacy journey. Rewriting Wor(l)ds is a project to explore how creative, play-based interaction with poetry can enhance young readers' sense of agency and highlight the creativity inherent in reading, all the while enriching their reading experience and overall wellbeing.

Rewriting Wor(l)ds is the latest and most significant project in a body of collaborative research between researchers Patrick Errington, Sarah McGeown, and Dan Mirman. The team brings together thinking in poetic and creative theory, literacy and education research, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Working with a range of literacy, literature, festival, and tech organisation partners, the project is tapping into a community of young writers, readers and researchers to co-produce an app – ReWriter – initially over a four-year period. The aim is to enable young people to read, feel, change and share poetry in a way that encourages sustained, real-world engagement with books, reading and other readers.

Funded by a Future Leaders Fellowship from UK Research and Innovation: 2025 to 2029

LLC team: Dr Patrick Errington (Project Lead)

Scotland and Russia have a long tradition of mutual engagement and influence, going back to the Middle Ages and still thriving today. Drawing on the expertise of scholars, creative practitioners and the general public, Scotland and Russia: Cultural Encounters Since 1900 explores the full spectrum of these connections: from passive consumption of each other’s culture to ethnographic reflection upon it; from creative transformation of each other’s cultural products to professional collaboration in the creation of joint cultural capital.

In addition to three collaboratively-hosted academic conferences covering music, theatre, literature, art, politics and history, the project has organised concerts, a performance workshop, and talks by visiting speakers. Its website hosts an extensive cultural archive of textual, audio and visual materials - some newly translated and all brought together for the first time.

Sir David Lyndsay’s epic Renaissance drama Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (Satire of the Three Estates) is the most important pre-modern play produced in Scotland. The collaborative, interdisciplinary project Staging the Scottish Renaissance Court drew on performance, film, literary and historical analysis, archaeology and architectural studies to stage the play in its entirety in June 2013 for the first time in over 450 years. Working with AndBC Theatre Company and Historic Scotland, the research team explored the significance of Lyndsay’s play for Scottish cultural history and national identity, both in its own time and today. The production was nominated for a Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland.

As no script survives for the earliest version of the play, the researchers reconstructed a text from documentary and literary source material. This was then performed by a professional company in Linlithgow Palace, where Ane Satyre was staged in 1540, and at Stirling Castle, with additional outdoor performances of the 1550s panoramic version of the play. The project website hosts contextual, visual and research material and teaching resources, including recordings of the performances. To mark the end of the project, Edinburgh hosted an international symposium on David Lindsay and Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis.

The Northern Scottish islands of Orkney and Shetland have both a rich literary history and an active community of poets and novelists at work today. Exploring the many continuities between the historic and the contemporary is challenging, given the location of the islands, and the geographic dispersal of the many people who can contribute to the process, including literary historians, museum professionals, writers, and their audiences. Bringing these groups together, Writing the North unlocked a range of archival and contextual material - shedding light on forgotten writers, and inspiring new work. 

Arising out of Professor Penny Fielding's earlier AHRC Fellowship on Shetland and Orkney literature and the literary record of visitors to the islands, t​​​he project involved a major six-week exhibition bringing together two collections at Shetland Museum and Archives. Associated activities and events included an animation, lesson packs for schools, digital resources, and a series of creative 'dialogues' resulting in "Archipelagos", an anthology steeped in Shetlandic and Orcadian history. Beyond Scotland, the project has acted as a model for preserving and celebrating minority languages and dialects, including through connections with Hudson’s Bay Company Archives in Manitoba, Canada. Although Writing the North has formally ended, related activities such as writing workshops, continue.

Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): May 2013 to June 2014

LLC team: Professor Penny Fielding (Principal Investigator), Robert Alan Jamieson, Professor Alex Thomson