Conference programme

The Department of English Literature at Edinburgh University is delighted to host the Twelfth International Walter Scott Conference, in the 250th year since his birth in this city.

Please note that due to the ongoing restrictions on international travel and on the use of the University buildings, this will be an online conference. Participants will send papers in the form of recorded presentations in advance of panel discussions; in the week before the conference, the programme, on this website, will link to those presentations. Panel discussion, and plenary lectures, will take place by videotelephony.

14:00 – 15:50

Welcome

Opening Plenary: The Jane Millgate Memorial Lecture

Chair: Bob Irvine

Prof. Alison Lumsden, University of Aberdeen. Re-awakening the Harp of the North: Scott at 250.

Take me to Eventbrite to book my ticket 

16:00–16:50

Panel 1. Landscape I: verse

Chair: Penny Fielding

1. Juliet Shields, University of Washington, Seattle. Lived-in Landscapes in Lady of the Lake and Clan-Albin.

2. Ainsley McIntosh. ‘O Caledonia! stern and wild’: Scott’s Poetry and Scot(t)-land.

3. Kathryn Chittick, Trent University, Canada. Walter Scott and Sir Tristrem: The Borders Origins of ‘Inglis’.

 

Panel 3. Abbotsford’s Collections in Focus

Chair: Prof. Alison Lumsden

7. Kirsty Archer-Thompson FSA Scot. ‘The full value of the influence of absence’: The Lost Collections of Sir Walter Scott.

8. Dr. Katie Stevenson. What the Housekeeper Knew: the ‘Curious’ Portrait on the Armoury Wall at Abbotsford.

9. Dr. Lindsay Levy. Exploring Scott’s Lost Library Catalogues.

10. George Dalgleish FSA Scot. The Curious Case of Edinburgh Mercat Cross and Three Cartloads of Stone from Sir Henry Raeburn.

 

17:00 – 18:00

Panel 4. Coastal Scott I: Scott on the Coast

Chair: Gerard Lee McKeever

11. Alexander Dick, University of British Columbia. Geologic Realism in The Lord of the Isles and ‘Vacation in 1814’.

12. Samuel Baker, University of Texas at Austin. Two Highland Boys: Scott, Wordsworth, and the Coastal Ends of The Heart of Midlothian.

13. Anna Pilz, University of Edinburgh. Scott and Coastal Travel.

 

Panel 5. Scott and Monarchy

Chair: Bob Irvine

14. Henri Suhamy. Scott and the English Revolution.

15. Norman Arthur Fischer, Kent State University. Scott’s Knights Against Tyranny.

16. Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley. ‘A King who reigns and does not rule’: Weak sovereignty in The Fortunes of Nigel. 

 

Panel 6. Minstrels, Troubadours, Theory

Chair: Matthew Reznicek

17. Diego Saglia, University of Parma, Italy. Scott, the Troubadours and Europe’s Literary Modernity.

18. John Savarese, University of Waterloo, Canada. Musical Ambience and Cognitive Ecology in Percy, Ritson, and Scott.

19. Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University. From Flodden Field to Fields of Sense: Scott’s Poetic Vision and Markus Gabriel’s Realist Ontology.


14:00–14:50

Panel 7. Landscape II: novels

Chair: Ainsley McIntosh

20. Anna Fancett, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. The Natural World in The Bride of Lammermoor.

21. John Patrick Pazdziora, University of Tokyo.  ‘The Decayed Sanctuary’: Speaking Exclusionary Landscape in The Tale of Old Mortality.

22. Mary Nestor, Clemson University, South Carolina. Outsiders and Local Guides: Negotiating Landscape Familiarity, Belonging and Reader Perspective in Scott’s Works.

 

Panel 8. Perspectives on Ivanhoe

Chair: Bob Irvine

23. Dr Kang-yen Chiu, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan. Ivanhoe in the Modern History of Taiwan (ROC).

24. Paul Barnaby, University of Edinburgh. Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret and the French Ivanhoe.

41. Kate Flaherty, Australian National University. Elsewhere Within: Meg Merrilies, Charlotte Cushman, and Scotland.

 

Panel 9: Trauma and Cultural Memory I

Chair: Penny Fielding

26. Silvia Mergenthal, University of Konstanz. Prisons, Graveyards, Battlefields: Scott(ish) Traumascapes.

27. Kenneth McNeil, Eastern Connecticut State University. (Un)Forgetting the Covenanters:  Scottish Cultural Memory after The Tale of Old Mortality.

 

15:00–15:50

Panel 10. Coastal Scott II: The Coast after Scott.

Chair: Samuel Baker

28. Gerard Lee McKeever, University of Stirling. Reading Scott on the Solway Firth.

29. Eric Gidal, University of Iowa. Valley Sections and Coastal Networks from Scott to Geddes.

30. Susan Oliver, University of Essex. Inshore Fishing in the 21st Century: Romance and Realism of Scott’s Legacy.

 

Panel 11. Scott in Space and Time

Chair: Deidre Lynch

31. Carly Yingst, Harvard University. Old News: Periodical Time and Delay in Scott’s Early Historical Novels.

32. Hilary Clydesdale, University of Edinburgh. Walter Scott, ‘A Prophesier of things Past’: Locating History within Time and Space in Guy Mannering, or the Astrologer (1815).

33. Nadia Faconti-Christodoulou, University of Aberdeen. Pilgrimage, Refuge and the Road in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

 

Panel 12. Scott at the Frontier

Chair: Caroline McCracken-Flesher

34. Dr Sarah Sharp, University of Aberdeen. ‘How much more healthy is your Walter Scott’: Reading Scott and Imagining Settler Colonial Identity.

35. Jeremy M. Johnston, Buffalo Bill Center of the West. From the Borders to Wyoming: Sir Walter Scott and the Johnson County War.

 

16:00–16:50

Panel 13. Landscape III: genre

Chair: John Savarese

36. Dr Dan Wall, University of Aberdeen. ‘Landscapes of the Imagination: sketching the scenery of Scott’s Lives of the Novelists’.

37. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, University of Wyoming. ‘Terra newly Incognita: Scott’s introductions and remapping the temporal landscape of the novel.’

38. Daniel Cook, University of Dundee. Reading Wandering Willie’s Tale.

 

Panel 14. Trauma and Cultural Memory II

Chair: Ian Duncan

39. Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Mediating Jacobites in Cultural Memory: from the 1745 Rising to Waverley.

40. Erin Saladin, Harvard University. Scott’s Sepulchral Literature.

6. Matthew Reznicek, Creighton University, Nebraska. Healing The Nation: Women, Medicine, and the Romantic National Tale.

17:00–18:00

Plenary event: book launch

Authors and editors in conversation

Chair: Michelle Houston, Edinburgh University Press

The Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry:

Ainsley McIntosh, ed. Marmion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes, ed. Shorter Poems (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

Susan Oliver, Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Matt Wickman, eds. Walter Scott at 250: Looking Forward  (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Daniel Cook, Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)


14:00–14:50

Panel 16. Scott in Europe

Chair: Penny Fielding

44. Graham Tulloch. Scott and the Two Sicilies.

45. Margaretmary Daley, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. Sir Walter Schott-land: Landscapes in German-Language Historical Novels.

46. Bob Irvine, University of Edinburgh. Narrative form and political violence in The Black Dwarf and Vadim: Scott, Shakespeare, Lermontov.

 

Panel 17. Antiquarianism and Scott’s sources

Chair: Eric Gidal

47. Zachary Garber, University of Oxford.  ‘Such Acts to Chronicles I Yield’: Sir Walter Scott’s Collection of Medieval Chronicles and Their Influence Upon His Fiction.

48. Stephen Pallas, Stony Brook University. ‘To Intrude Upon the Province of History’: Dave Gellatly, Waverley, and the Writing of a Collective Heritage.

49. Genevieve McNutt. The Antiquary and the Abbot’s Apple.

 

15:00–15:50

Panel 18. Landscape IV: scenes and sketches

Chair: Kirsty Archer-Thompson

51. Lucy Wood. Writing Ruins: Walter Scott and the case of Melrose Abbey.

52. Kasie Alt, Georgia Southern University.  “Revisiting the ‘Rarée Show’: Repton’s Red Books through the Lens of Sir Walter Scott”.

53. Richard Hill, Chaminade University of Honolulu. James Skene’s Sketchbook and Scott’s Vision of Scotland.

 

Panel 19. Twentieth-Century Scott

Chair: Daniel Cook

54. Joshua Richards, MidAmerica Nazarene University. Gathering the Limbs of T. S. Eliot’s Sir Walter Scott.

55. Arianna Granata, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano / University of Glasgow. Bibliophilism and collecting in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004): two alter egos compared.

 

Panel 20. Scott’s life and religion

Chair: Bob Irvine

56. Marie Michlova, Charles University, Prague. A Tale of a Grandfather.

57. Amy McVeigh, University of Edinburgh. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’: Witches in the Fiction of Sir Walter Scott.

58. J. H. Alexander. University of Aberdeen. Scott’s Religious Discourses.

59. Peter Garside. Scott’s Last Words.

 

16:00–18:00

Closing Plenary Lecture

Prof. Deidre Lynch, Harvard University. Unbinding Walter Scott: Books, Scraps and Dispersive Reading.

Chair: Penny Fielding

 

Closing business: where next?


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