The 14th International Walter Scott Conference

About the event

We're thrilled to host the 14th International Walter Scott Conference at the University of Edinburgh, under the theme of 'Politics, Place and Print Culture'.

The conference will run from 28 to 30 June 2027, with an optional trip to Scott's home, Abbotsford House, on 1 July.

The two keynote speakers will be Philip Connell (University of Cambridge) and Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin), and the conference will also feature a special plenary session marking the 20th anniversary of Ian Duncan’s landmark monograph 'Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh' (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Map image reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Call for submissions

The 14th instalment of the International Walter Scott conference returns to the University of Edinburgh, Scott’s alma mater in the city of his birth.

Scott was at the centre of what Ian Duncan calls Edinburgh’s ‘northern literary galaxy’ in the early nineteenth century, while scholars continue to wrestle with the complexity of his dialogue with places (spots, localities, regions, nations …) across and well beyond the Anglosphere. Politically, Scott’s forthright, counter-revolutionary Toryism has not prevented his work from often seeming a mesh of alternatives, a textual world that readers responded to and appropriated for their own ends, then as now. At the same time, the evolving practices and expectations of print culture in the nineteenth century – from Victorian mass media to colonial school curricula to literary tourism – bore the imprint of Scott’s popularity as poet, critic, antiquarian and novelist.

We look forward to welcoming delegates to Edinburgh and invite papers on any and all aspects of Scott’s relationship to questions of politics, place and print culture.

Please send 300-word proposals for individual papers to the organising team led by Dr Gerard McKeever by 1 October 2026. For panels or roundtable sessions, please send a 250-word description of the topic and a few sentences on each of the papers involved. All submissions should include short biographical notes (no more than 50 words) on the contributor(s).

Details of financial support for postgraduates will be made available in due course.

About the speakers

Philip Connell is Professor of Literature and History at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as co-editor with Nigel Leask of Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is currently working on revolution and cultural memory in Romantic Britain.

Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. She is the author of John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and the shortly forthcoming Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on settler colonialism and literary modernity in the southern hemisphere.