Jack Medal win for research on Scotland and Germany

Dr Eleoma Bodammer, Reader in German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, has won the seventh annual Jack Medal for her work on the 19th century Scottish academic and translator John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895).

The Jack Medal is awarded by the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (IASSL) for the best article on a subject related to reception or diaspora in the discipline.  

Published in the book "Deutsch-Britischer Kulturtransfer im Vormärz" ["German-British Cultural Transfer in the Vormärz"], Eleoma’s medal-winning chapter focused on how Blackie introduced German literature to British readers, and on his English translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1808 play Faust I.

There are many connections between the author, her subject John Stuart Blackie, and Ronald Jack, after whom the Jack Medal is named.

All have held posts at the University of Edinburgh in which they have explored and championed links between Scotland, its literature and other countries and cultures; Blackie as Chair of Greek from 1852 to 1882, Jack as Professor of Scottish and Mediaeval Literature from 1987 to 2004, and Bodammer as a Reader in German Studies (2019 to present, having first joined the University in 2001).

Although John Stuart Blackie is largely known as a scholar of the classics, he had a passion for the German language and German literature which began while studying in Göttingen and Berlin in his early twenties. 

Commenting on Blackie’s contribution to her own field of study, Eleoma says “Alongside Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Blackie became a prolific cultural mediator of German literature in Scotland, and published essays, translations and book reviews in British periodicals that created a significant context for the emerging academic field of German Studies in Scotland in the nineteenth century.” 

Eleoma’s research and teaching interests include literary translation, and she is also an award-winning literary translator. 

In her chapter, the full title of which is ‘John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895): Translating Faust I in Scotland (1834)’, she discusses Blackie’s contribution to nineteenth-century translation theories, particularly his use of metaphors in his translator’s preface to Faust I.

To interpret Blackie’s ideas about translation, she draws on Rainer Guldin’s classification system for translation metaphors, as set out in his 2015 book “Translation as metaphor revisited”.

In accepting the Jack Medal, Eleoma has thanked the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding her Research Fellowship on Scottish-German Cultural Exchange, and the British Academy for a Small Research Grant shared with Professor Essaka Joshua (University of Notre Dame).

On completion of her current Leverhulme Research Fellowship on the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, Dr Eleoma Bodammer will be returning to teaching and postgraduate research supervision in September 2025. Her Jack Medal will be officially presented at the IASSL Congress in Philadelphia in 2027. In 2022, Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh (Celtic and Scottish Studies) was jointly awarded the Medal with his collaborator Nigel Leask.

Doctorate-level study is an opportunity to expand upon your interests and expertise in a community that really values research and to make an original, positive contribution to learning. We offer 20 doctoral programmes in literatures, languages and cultures including:

• German
• English and Scottish Literature
• Translation Studies
• Comparative Literature

• Dr Eleoma Bodammer - profile
• IASSL - The Jack Medal 2024