Robert Burns Conference and Workshop

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~ Supported By ~ Centre for Scottish Studies, Simon Fraser University Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Vancouver Burns Club English Department, Simon Fraser University Vice-President, Academic, Simon Fraser University Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity Western University Whitman College ~ © 2009 Simon Fraser University, Leith Davis ~	Participants: Sharon Alker Robert Barr Jon Bartlett Fiona Black Valentina Bold Gerard Carruthers David Chariandy Robert Crawford Leith Davis Ray Eagle Carole Gerson David Hamilton Nigel Leask Christine Kim Susan Manning Kirsteen McCue Carol McGuirk Holly Faith Nelson Andrew Noble Emma Pink Murray Pittock Rika Ruebsaat Laura Ralph Michael Vance Todd Wong Abstracts of proposed presentations: Sharon Alker, Assistant Professor of English and General Studies, Whitman College Selected Publications: "The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Memoirs of a Cavalier," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2006 (19:1): 43-68; "James Hogg as Working-Class Autobiographer: Tactical Manoeuvres in a Memoir of the Author's Life," Studies in Hogg and his World 16 (2006): 63-79 (with H.F. Nelson); "Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Jacobite Scot," Studies in English Literature (Spring 2007) (with H.F. Nelson); "Cross-Border Friendship: Robert Bage's Britain," Eighteenth-Century Scotland 19 (Spring, 2005): 9-12; "Ghastly in the Moonlight: Wordsworth, Hogg and the Anguish of War," Studies in Hogg and his World (2005): 76-89 (with H.F. Nelson); "The Geography of Negotiation: Wales, Anglo Scottish Sympathy, and Tobias Smollett," Lumen XXI (2003): 87-103; "The Business of Romance: Mary Brunton and the Virtue of Commerce," European Romantic Review 13. 2 (June 2002): 199-205. Presentation Abstract: The Cyber-Bard: Robert Burns and the World Wide Web Understanding the role of the new media in literary studies is a challenging task; eighteenth-century authors and their texts are increasingly accessible, but in new, often unrecognizable, forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Walter Ong and Alan Liu, among others, this paper will establish the complex nature and cultural significance of Robert Burns's presence on the Internet. It will then evaluate the impact of a post-modern technology -- which privileges the sound bite, the image, and an abundance of paratextual material -- on the figure and works of Burns. It will ultimately propose that the movement of Burns forward into cyberspace is an act of reclamation insofar as it allows orality, a key element of bardic speech (under siege in Burns's age), to be reasserted in podcasts or video form, albeit in a virtual sense that allows the presence inherent in orality to be mimicked. Robert Barr Robert Barr will be contributing to the “Community Research Forum: Burns in BC,” Wed. April 8, 3:45-5:00 p.m. Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat have researched and performed folksongs in Canada and the U.S. for over 30 years. They published Canada Folk Bulletin, a bi-monthly national magazine and have been active in the Canadian Folk Music Society, Jon as president and Rika as secretary, editing the Society's magazine. From 1991 to 1999 they were involved in organizing CityFest, a cultural festival presenting the music, dance, visual and spoken arts of Vancouver area community groups. Jon coordinated the festival for its last 4 years. Selected Publications: "Lamkin,' The Terror of Countless Nurseries'", in Roger de V. Renwick and Sigrid Reiwerts, eds. Ballad Mediations: Folksongs Recovered, Represented, and Reimagined (Wissenschaftlichter Verlag Trier, 2006). Jon Bartlett has also published widely in the Canada Folk Bulletin and Canadian Folk Music/Musique folklorique canadienne. In addition, with Rika Ruebsaat, he has produced a number of recordings, including Steveston Bound (2006), Come to Me in Canada (2004), The Young Man from Canada (2003), RCI, Songs and Stories of Canada, Radio Canada International set of 4 LPs, (1983), The Green Fields of Canada (1982). Presentation Abstract: Burns in British Columbia This paper will examine the influence of Burns' oeuvre on the ways that British Columbians have historically shaped their own culture. James Anderson, for example, fashioned numerous items during the Cariboo gold rush of the early 1860's that can be linked to Burns, and many other cultural artifacts inspired or informed by Burns were produced in other parts of the province during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accounts of Burns suppers as well as songs and poems styled after Burns' material will be examined and interrogated. A comparison will be made between the Burns-based compositions and those based on other models, such as hymns and Tin Pan Alley songs, in an effort to understand the degree to which social class determined the proliferation of Burns material. Fiona Black, Director of School of Information Management and Associate Dean, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University Selected Publications: Co-Editor, History of the Book in Canada, Volume 2, 1840-1918, Yvan Lamonde, Patricia L. Fleming and Fiona A. Black, eds. (U of Toronto P, 2005); "The Circulation of Books and Print: Importation and Book Availability," History of the Book in Canada Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840, Patricia Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. (U of Toronto P, 2003); "'Advent'rous Merchants and Atlantic Waves:' A Preliminary Study of the Scottish Contribution to Book Availability in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1752-1810," Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory, Michael Vance and Marjorie Harper, eds. (Fernwood Publishing; John Donald, 1999); "Book Distribution to the Scottish and Canadian Provinces, 1750-1820: Examples of Methods and Availability," The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Book, Peter Isaac and Barry McKay, eds. (St. Paul's Bibliographies; Oak Knoll Press, 1998). Presentation Abstract: Mapping the Bard in Transatlantic Print Culture Published editions of Burns poems arrived in North America within weeks of coming off the presses in Britain. Their availability was advertised in Colonial newspapers. Within two years of the Kilmarnock edition's publication, printers and publishers in New York and Philadelphia were competing with British editions by distributing their own across North America. Nevertheless, by far the majority of editions of poetry broadsides and collections of Burns were published in Glasgow or London and exported either from printers/ publishers to colonial booksellers or through the intermediary of general merchants and wholesaling warehouses. This paper, building on the author's earlier published work on book availability in Georgian Canada, and with the History of the Book in Canada project, focuses on selected Canadian and American towns in the period 1786 to 1914, and analyses the availability in print of Burns' work, imitations of it, and commentaries on it. Valentina Bold, Head of Scottish Studies, University of Glasgow, Dumfries Crichton Campus Selected Publications: James Hogg: A Bard of Nature's Making (Peter Lang, 2007); Smeddum. A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology (Canongate, 2001);"'Neither right spelt nor right setten doun': Child, Scott and the Hogg family ballads," The Ballad in Scottish History, ed. Edward Cowan, (Tuckwell Press, 2000); Northern Folk: Living Traditions of North East Scotland (CD-rom)(University of Aberdeen, 1999) co-edited with Thomas A. McKean; "'Inmate of the Hamlet': Burns as 'Heaven-taught ploughman,'" Love and Liberty. Robert Burns: A Bicentenary Celebration, ed. Kenneth Simpson (Tuckwell Press, 1997); "James Hogg and the Scottish Self Taught Tradition," The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994). Presentation Abstract: 'Hooked' by Robert Burns: Scottish Identity in South Carolina This paper explores the function of Burns and, in particular, Burns suppers in South Carolina. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1998 and 2001, and follow-up work between 2001 and 2007, it focuses on the experiences of the diaspora community in Columbia. In this context, Burns Suppers are a key Scottish calendar custom, along with Tartan Day, Highland Games and St Andrews Night, creating a coherent identity which can exist, comfortably, alongside existing allegiances to South Carolina and the United States. The paper will explore the ways in which, further to this phenomenon, Burns becomes a malleable symbol of Scotland, past and present, in ways that are culturally adapted to local contexts. Burns Suppers can function as rites of passage for the diaspora Scot, often satisfying preconceptions, and needs, within this community. The figure of Burns, in short, operates both as a receptacle and transmitter of key notions of Scottish identity. Gerard Carruthers, Reader and Head of Department, Scottish Literature and Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow Selected Publications: Editor, forthcoming online edition of the letters of James Currie, Burns's first editor; Editor, Edinburgh University Press Companion to Burns, (forthcoming); Editor, The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007); Robert Burns (Northcote Publishing, 2006); Editor, Burns: Poems (Alfred Knopf,2006); Co-Editor, Walter Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh UP, 2004); Co-Editor, English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge UP, 2003). Presentation Abstract: Robert Burns in North America 1790-1820 Unlike numerous Scots and Ulster-Scots poets during the 1790s suspected of, or implicated in, reformist activity, Robert Burns was not driven into exile in cities like Philadelphia. However, these émigré poetic activists often took with them ideas of Burns extending to the republishing of his poetry in North American periodicals. This paper examines such early North American Burns related activity before analyzing the usage made of Burns by journalists and politicians in the early nineteenth-century American Republic. The comparative use of Burns in the English-speaking parts of Canada in the same period is drawn upon. David Chariandy, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University Selected Publications: Soucouyant (2007) [longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize]. "David Chariandy: Afro-Canadian Novelist and Essayist. A Special Section" Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 801-835; "The Fiction of Belonging: Second Generation Black Writing in English Canada" Callaloo 30.3 (Summer 2007): 824-835; "Postcolonial Diasporas," Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2005/2006) http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/pocol/index.php; "That's What You Want, Isn't It? Austin Clarke and the Politics of Recognition" The Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1-2 (November 2005): 79-103. Presentation Abstract: Scottish and Caribbean Diasporic Connections This presentation at the roundtable on "Diasporic Connections" will discuss the history and politics of the Caribbean diaspora, especially in Canada, aiming to draw connections and point out differences between the Caribbean and Scottish diasporic experiences and literary representations of those experiences. Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature, St. Andrews University Selected Publications: Scotland's Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (Penguin, 2007); Apollos of the North (Polygon, 2006); Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford UP, 2006); The Book of St Andrews (Polygon, 2005); Heaven-Taught Fergusson (Tuckwell, 2003); The Modern Poet (Oxford UP, 2001); Devolving English Literature (2nd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2000); Co-Editor, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Penguin,2000); Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (EdinburghUP, 1997); The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge UP, 1998); Full Volume (Cape,2008); Selected Poems (Cape, 2005); The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003); A Scottish Assembly (Chatto,1990); Sharawaggi (Polygon, 1990). Public Lecture Robert Crawford will be reading from and discussing his forthcoming biography of Robert Burns (Cape, forthcoming 2009). Leith Davis, Professor of English Literature and Director, Scottish Studies Centre, Simon Fraser University Selected Publications: Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724-1874 (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Co-Ed., Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005); "From Fingal's Harp to Flora's Song: Scotland, Music and Romanticism," The Wordsworth Circle (Spring, 2000), 93-97; "Gender and the Nation in the Work of Robert Burns and Janet Little," Studies in English Literature (Autumn, 1998), 621-645; Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 (Stanford UP, 1998); "The Politics of Hypochondriasis: James Currie's Works of Robert Burns," Studies in Romanticism 32 (Spring, 1997), 43-60; "`Bounded to a District Space': Burns, Wordsworth and the Margins of English Literature," English Studies in Canada 20:1 (March, 1994), 23-40. Presentation Abstract: Bringing it All Back Home: Burns, Tourism and the Diasporic Gaze This paper considers the ricochet effect of the image of Burns: the impact of Burns's appeal abroad on the image of contemporary Scotland. It has been argued that "migrant, ethnic / diasporic, transnational communities" experience their "locality" of origin "symbolically." This paper focuses on the symbolic use made of the figure of Burns in the 2009 "Homecoming" Celebrations sponsored by the Scottish government, noting the contradictions of deploying the figure of an eighteenth-century poet to promote business interests and the image of a modern Scotland. Based on this case study and recent film theory, I discuss the "Diasporic Gaze," suggesting that for members of the diaspora Scotland serves as a site of scopic desire. This gaze, splitting both observer and observed, threatens to fix Scotland as a permanent site of nostalgia. Burns's work, however, can offer a way out of this binary opposition. Ray Eagle Ray Eagle will be contributing to the “Community Research Forum: Burns in BC,” Wed. April 8, 3:45-5:00 p.m. Carole Gerson, Professor of English Literature, Simon Fraser University Selected Publications: Editor, History of the Book in Canada, vol 3 (1918-80) (U. of Toronto Press; PUM, 2007); "Design and Ideology in A Pocketful of Canada," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (PBSC), 44:2 (Fall 2006): 65-85; E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gerson and VeronicaStrong-Boag (U of Toronto P, 2002); (with Veronica Strong-Boag) Paddling Her Own Canoe: Times and Texts E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (U of Toronto P, 2000); Roland Graeme: Knight. By Agnes Maule Machar, 1892. Introduced and annotated by Carole Gerson (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1996). Presentation Abstract: In a 1908 poll conducted by the Toronto Globe, Burns held the middle rank among readers’ favourite poets – behind Tennyson, Shakespeare, Browning and Longfellow, but ahead of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Milton. Some of this popularity may be attributed to a sense of nostalgia among the large proportion of Canadians whose families had immigrated from Scotland. As well, Burns was a common reference point among Canada’s social reformers, from all social classes. Working-class organizer Marie Joussaye adulated Burns in “Two Poets” (1895), her poem contrasting the obscurity of Browning with the accessibility of Burns, a “hardy, humble ploughman of the soil” whose “name was known in palace and in cot” because his poems represented “The grandest thoughts couched in the simplest words.” This paper will trace and analyze Burns’s enduring presence in several interweaving strands of Canadian cultural history: nostalgia for the Old World; representations of ethnicity through the use of dialect and romanticization of poverty; and advocacy of the rights of workers and common folk. Along with literary criticism, sources will include labour history, folklore studies, and readership studies. David Hamilton, Lecturer, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; Tutor, Music School of Douglas Academy; Director of Music, St Mary's Episcopal Church, Hamilton Selected Publications: The Organ Music of Dietrich Buxtehude on Divine Art (2007) Presentation: David Hamilton will be accompanying Dr. Kirsteen McCue on piano for the public recital. Nigel Leask, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, Department of English, School of English and Scottish Language and Literature, University of Glasgow Selected Publications: "Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart and the Philosophy of Common Sense," Romantic Empiricism and the Scottish Common Sense Tradition, ed. Gavin Budge, (Bucknell, 2007);"Shadowlines: Currie's Burns and British Romanticism," Romanticism's Debateable Lands, ed. Mike Rossington and Claire Lamont (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Co-Editor, Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2004); Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840 (Oxford UP, 2002); Editor, S.T.Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (J.M.Dent, 1997); The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). Presentation Abstract: Burns and Latin America Burns's poetry wasn't translated into Spanish until 1919 (Scott's Ivanhoe was translated in 1825, and the Talisman in 1826). Yet in 'Address of Beelzebub' Burns compares the President of the Highland Society to the Spanish Conquistadores Almagro and Pizarro, and he was evidently familiar with the history of the Spanish Conquest of America through William Robertson's History of America and Histoire des Incas de Peru, among the books in his possession at the time of his death. This paper will explore Burns's connections with the Latin America republics in the era of their independence struggle against colonial Spain. Christine Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University Selected Publications: "Troubling the Mosaic: Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences," Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, ed. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn (forthcoming Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008), 308-42; "Feminist and Regionalist Modernisms: Contemporary Verse and Canadian Modernist Poetry," Wider; Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry, ed. Di Brandt and Barbara Godard (forthcoming Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008); "Rita Wong's Monkeypuzzle and the Poetics of Social Justice," Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (March 2008): 58-73; "Cultural Copyright: Editorial Conflict and Women's Press," Open Letter 10th Series No. 4 (Fall 2004): 38-47; "Signifying the Nation: Gabriel Dumont, Harry Robinson, and the Canadian Captivity Narrative," Studies in Canadian Literature 28.1 (2003): 90-108. Presentation Abstract: Asian Diasporic Culture This presentation will outline some of the key features of the literature and culture of the Asian diaspora in Canada and the United States in an attempt to establish a context for comparing them with the literature and culture of the Scottish diaspora. It will also discuss the confluence and divergence of ideas of diaspora and postcolonialism as applied to post-national writing. Susan Manning, Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh Selected Publications: Co-Editor, Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh UP, 2007); Co-Editor, Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2006); Co-Editor, Enlightenment and Emancipation (Bucknell UP, 2006); Co-Editor, Symbiosis Special Numbers, Across the Great Divide, 8.1 and 8.2 (2004); Editor, The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Oxford UP, 2002); Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Palgrave 2002); Editor, Julia de Roubigné, by Henry Mackenzie (Tuckwell, 1999); The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 1990). Presentation Abstract: Transatlantic Romantic Biography and the Life of Burns 'I shall ask what it means to map a poetic afterlife; more particularly, to map a spatially translated afterlife. When we trace the transatlantic editions and biographies of Burns we get some measure of the popularity of the poet; the fact that people, often not wealthy, thought it worth their while to fork out sometimes substantial sums from meagre resources to acquire a relic of the national bard of a faraway land. These records enable us to infer quite a lot about migration patterns, the reading habits of emigrants, the material forms of tradition and transmission, and many other things. They don’t, however, tell us about affect, except in a quantitative sense: there’s clearly a lot of it about, around Burns in the nineteenth century. How can we tell what ‘Burns’ meant to his transatlantic readers? To approach this question I look closely at some textual appropriations of both Burns’s poetry and his life.' Kirsteen McCue, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Associate Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow Selected Publications: "'An individual flowering on a common stem': melody, performance and National Song," Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland," eds. Philip Connell & Nigel Leask (Cambridge UP, 2008, in press); with Janette Currie) "Editing the Text and Music of James Hogg's Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd (1831),"Scottish Studies Review 8 (Autumn 2007), 54-68; "Schottische Lieder ohne Worte? : what happened to thewords for the Scots song arrangements by Beethoven and Weber?," Scotland in Europe, eds. Tom Hubbard & R.D.S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 119-136; Joseph Haydn Werke Reihe XXXII, Band 4: Volksliederbeiarbeitungen Nr. 269-364 Schottische Lieder fur George Thomson, eds. Marjorie Rycroft, Kirsteen McCue, Warwick Edwards (Munich: Henle Verlag, 2004). Presentation Abstract: Serge Hovey's 'Robert Burns Songbook' Many composers across the globe have been inspired by the lyrics of Robert Burns and have set them accordingly. But there is one transatlantic project that stands above all others: the Burns settings of Americancomposer Serge Hovey (1920-1989) - a collection of 324 songs which occupied Hovey for over thirty years. After a friend introduced him to Burns's bawdy songs, Hovey felt "a magnetic attraction" to the Scottish poet. Hovey's musical imagination was inspired by the melodies for these songs, which took him to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, the first musical publication of Burns's songs in his lifetime. This essay argues that Hovey's detailed research into the musical context of these songs is unrivalled by any other musician and that his commentaries provide us with an insight into his working practice as an American composer coming face-to-face with a 200 year old Scottish song tradition. Carol McGuirk, Professor, Department of English, Florida Atlantic University Selected Publications: Editor, Critical Essays on Robert Burns (Twayne, 1998); "Haunted by Authority: Nineteenth-century Americn Constructions of Robert Burns and Scotland," Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, ed. Robert Crawford (U of Iowa P, 1997);"George Thomson and Robert Burns: With Friends Like These," Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 9 (1995): 16-20; "Places in the Peasant Heart: Robert Burns's Scotland, Stephen Foster's American South, and Walt Disney's World," Scotlands 2.2 (1995): 11-35; Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1994); "Burns and Nostalgia," Burns Now, ed. Kenneth Simpson (Canongate; 1994), 31-69; "Scottish Hero, Scottish Victim: Myths of Robert Burns," The History of Scottish Literature, II: 1660-1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen UP, 1987); Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (U of Georgia P, 1985) Presentation Abstract: Burns and Aphorism This essay considers the tension between lyric ambiguity in Burns and the “aphoristic” destination of many of his famous phrases. Burns’s vernacular predecessor Allan Ramsay published a collection of Scottish folk aphorisms in the 1720s, and I consider Burns’s writings that draw from these old Scots adages as well as some that he himself devised. Burns, when considered in full poetic and biographical context, is a notably ambiguous and elusive figure; but snippets and simple phrases from Burns have established a separate afterlife as repositories of folk “wisdom.” Famous lines from Burns (“The best-laid schemes of mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”; “Oh, wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us”; “man’s inhumanity to man, etc.”) have a double history. They are powerful lines in poetic context but they also live on also as wise sayings to be recycled in such compendia as Bartlett’s Familliar Quotations, whose numerous quotations from Burns will be briefly discussed. Burns’s aphorisms surface in many levels of popular culture. Surveying popular culture for its frequent recyclings of Burns’s sayings, I also read these famous-sayings back into their original poetic context, considering how posterity has edited and recast Burns, but also how the poet complicates “folk wisdom” when he invokes it in his poems and songs. Holly Faith Nelson, Associate Professor and Interim Chair and Graduate Stream Coordinator, English Department; Co-Director, Gender Studies Institute, Trinity Western University > Selected Publications: Co-Ed., James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (forthcoming Ashgate, 2009); Co-Ed., Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (Broadview Press, 2005); Co-Ed., Of Paradise and Light (U of Delaware P, 2004); "'The Science of Nature: Colonial Resistance in Hogg's "The Pongos,"' James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace (forthcoming Ashgate, 2009) (with S. Alker); "Memory, Monuments, and Melancholy Genius in Margaret Cavendish's 'Bell in Campo,'" Eighteenth Century Fiction 21.1(2008): 13-35 (with S. Alker);"Staging the Shifting Nation: Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union," Studies in English Literature 47.2 (Spring 2007): 379-401 (with S. Alker); "James Hogg as Working Class Autobiographer: Tactical Maneuvers in a 'Memoir of the Author's Life,'" Studies in Hogg and His World 16 (2006): 63-79 (with S. Alker). Presentation Abstract: The Cyber-Bard: Robert Burns and the World Wide Web Understanding the role of the new media in literary studies is a challenging task; eighteenth-century authors and their texts are increasingly accessible, but in new, often unrecognizable, forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Walter Ong and Alan Liu, among others, this paper will establish the complex nature and cultural significance of Robert Burns's presence on the Internet. It will then evaluate the impact of a post-modern technology -- which privileges the sound bite, the image, and an abundance of paratextual material -- on the figure and works of Burns. It will ultimately propose that the movement of Burns forward into cyberspace is an act of reclamation insofar as it allows orality, a key element of bardic speech (under siege in Burns's age), to be reasserted in podcasts or video form, albeit in a virtual sense that allows the presence inherent in orality to be mimicked. Andrew Noble > Selected Publications: "Burns, Scotland and Russia," Russian Settings of Robert Burns (Toccata Classics, 2008); "Displaced Persons:Burns and the Renfrew Radicals." Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. R Harris (Edinburgh2002): 196-225; The Canongate Burns. eds. A. Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg (Canongate U.S., 2002);"Wordsworth and Burns: the anxiety of being under the influence," Critical Essays on Robert Burns. ed.McGuirk, Carol (G.K. Hall, 1998): 49-62; "Burns and Scottish Nationalism," Burns Now. ed. Simpson, Kenneth (Canongate, 1994): 167-92; From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson's Emigrant Journey(Aberdeen University Press, 1985); Robert Louis Stevenson. (London, 1983); The Art of Robert Burns. eds. A.Noble and Ronald D. S. Jack (Vision Press, 1982); Edwin Muir, Uncollected Scottish Criticism. ed. A. (Vision Press, 1982). Presentation Abstract: Burns, Scotland and the American Revolution This essay will consider the mixed impact of the American Revolution on late-eighteenth-century Scottish society. In so doing, it will provide the necessary context for Burns's comprehensive sense of the fundamental nature and, hence, the profound political consequences of that revolution for Scotland's future political identity. An examination of relevant poems will reveal not only the allusively, tellingly detailed remarks on matters American diffused throughout Burns's poetry and letters but also the fact that America, arguably more than France, is the model polis which, tragically, pan-British radical politics cannot attain. This will be demonstrated a detailed reading of the relation, hitherto un-noted, between Paine's 1775 poem Liberty Tree and Burns's The Tree of Liberty and Ode on General Washington's Birthday. Emma Pink, Ph.D. Candidate, English Department, Simon Fraser University, and Laura E. Ralph, M.A. Candidate (English Stream), English Department, Trinity Western University Selected Publications: Emma Pink, "Frances Burney's Camilla: 'to print my Grand Work...by subscription.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 2006 Fall; 40 (1): 51-68. Presentation Abstract: Robert Burns and Caribbean Culture The Scots played an important role in the Jamaican plantations; Robert Burns even intended to go there at one point in order to improve his finances. Although Burns never made it in person across to the Caribbean, his work did. This paper presents preliminary research on the reception of Burns in the Caribbean. Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Associate Dean (Research), University of Glasgow Presentation Abstract: Slavery as a Political Metaphor in Scotland and Ireland in the Age of Burns: As well as a dreadful transnational reality and source of extensive policy debate, slavery was also a major literary, political, religious and social metaphor in the age of Burns. This essay will examine the metaphor of slavery in Burns in the context of its use by the United Irishmen, whose poets and writers -- Orr and Drennan --in the north of the island had a close relationship to Burns and provided a highly politicized environment for his early reception on the island of Ireland. In the UI context, the apparent voluntary consent to slavery mourned by Burns was less important, because they were on the verge of a real insurrection, and the connection between "Irish oppression, British imperialism and the enslavement of Africa" made by Hugh Mulligan and others was more of a stimulant to action than an acknowledgement of defeat. Selected Publications: The Road to Independence: Scotland Since the Sixties (Reaktion and Chicago UP, 2008); Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford UP, 2008); Editor, The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (Continuum, 2007); James Boswell (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2007); Co-editor, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2006); A New History of Scotland (Sutton, 2003); Editor, James Hogg: Jacobite Relics (Edinburgh UP, 2002-3; 2 vols.); Scottish Nationality (Palgrave Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2001); The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh and Columbia UP, 1995; 2009). Laura Ralph Laura Ralph is an M.A. student at Trinity Western University. She volunteered at the conference Through A Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime, held at TWU in May, 2007. As a research assistant of Dr. Jens Zimmermann, a Canada Research Chair at TWU, she has worked on several forthcoming collections of scholarly essays (e.g. Heidegger und die Dichtung- Heidegger and Poetics-forthcoming Rodopi). Michael Vance, Associate Professor, Department of History, Saint Mary's University, Halifax Selected Publications: "Mon- he's a gran' fish": Scots in British Columbia's Interwar Fishing Industry,” BC Studies, no. 158 (Summer 2008): 33-60; Co-Editor, William Wye Smith: Recollections of a Nineteenth-Century Scottish Canadian (Natural Heritage Books, 2008); "A Brief History of Organized Scottishness in Canada," Transatlantic Scots, ed. C. Ray (U of Alabama P, 2005), 96-119; "Powerful Pathos: The Triumph of Scottishness in Nova Scotia," Transatlantic Scots, ed. C. Ray (U of Alabama P, 2005), 156-179. Co-Editor, Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia c.1600 -1990 (John Donald and Fernwood Publishing, 1999). Presentation Abstract: Burns in the Park: A Tale of Three Monuments This paper will explore the history behind the erection of three statues of Robert Burns in Canada: the first in Allan Gardens, Toronto (1902), the second in Victoria Park, Halifax (1919) and the third in Stanley Park, Vancouver (1928). It will identify the groups responsible for erecting each monument, discuss each statue's iconography and physical placement, and explore the social context for each unveiling. It will also place these monuments in an international context, drawing comparisons with monuments erected in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The history of these statues provides insight into the transatlantic reception of Robert Burns and into the nature of the colonial societies in which they were erected. For example, despite the egalitarian sentiments expressed at its unveiling and later rededication, the erection of a Burns monument in Stanley Park participated in the erasure of evidence of the long-standing indigenous presence on the peninsula.	M

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~ Supported By ~

Centre for Scottish Studies, Simon Fraser University

Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada

Vancouver Burns Club

English Department,
Simon Fraser University

Vice-President, Academic,
Simon Fraser University

Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences,
Simon Fraser University

Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Trinity Western University

Whitman College

~
© 2009 Simon Fraser University,
Leith Davis

Participants:

   Sharon Alker
   Robert Barr
   Jon Bartlett
   Fiona Black
   Valentina Bold
   Gerard Carruthers
   David Chariandy
   Robert Crawford
   Leith Davis
   Ray Eagle
   Carole Gerson

   David Hamilton
   Nigel Leask
   Christine Kim
   Susan Manning
   Kirsteen McCue
   Carol McGuirk
   Holly Faith Nelson

Abstracts of proposed presentations:

Sharon Alker, Assistant Professor of English and General Studies, Whitman College

Selected Publications:
"The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Memoirs of a Cavalier," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2006 (19:1): 43-68; "James Hogg as Working-Class Autobiographer: Tactical Manoeuvres in a Memoir of the Author's Life," Studies in Hogg and his World 16 (2006): 63-79 (with H.F. Nelson); "Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Jacobite Scot," Studies in English Literature (Spring 2007) (with H.F. Nelson); "Cross-Border Friendship: Robert Bage's Britain," Eighteenth-Century Scotland 19 (Spring, 2005): 9-12; "Ghastly in the Moonlight: Wordsworth, Hogg and the Anguish of War," Studies in Hogg and his World (2005): 76-89 (with H.F. Nelson); "The Geography of Negotiation: Wales, Anglo Scottish Sympathy, and Tobias Smollett," Lumen XXI (2003): 87-103; "The Business of Romance: Mary Brunton and the Virtue of Commerce," European Romantic Review 13. 2 (June 2002): 199-205.

Presentation Abstract:

The Cyber-Bard: Robert Burns and the World Wide Web
Understanding the role of the new media in literary studies is a challenging task; eighteenth-century authors and their texts are increasingly accessible, but in new, often unrecognizable, forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Walter Ong and Alan Liu, among others, this paper will establish the complex nature and cultural significance of Robert Burns's presence on the Internet. It will then evaluate the impact of a post-modern technology -- which privileges the sound bite, the image, and an abundance of paratextual material -- on the figure and works of Burns. It will ultimately propose that the movement of Burns forward into cyberspace is an act of reclamation insofar as it allows orality, a key element of bardic speech (under siege in Burns's age), to be reasserted in podcasts or video form, albeit in a virtual sense that allows the presence inherent in orality to be mimicked.

Robert Barr

Robert Barr will be contributing to the “Community Research Forum: Burns in BC,” Wed. April 8, 3:45-5:00 p.m.

Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat

Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat have researched and performed folksongs in Canada and the U.S. for over 30 years. They published Canada Folk Bulletin, a bi-monthly national magazine and have been active in the Canadian Folk Music Society, Jon as president and Rika as secretary, editing the Society's magazine. From 1991 to 1999 they were involved in organizing CityFest, a cultural festival presenting the music, dance, visual and spoken arts of Vancouver area community groups. Jon coordinated the festival for its last 4 years.

Selected Publications:

"Lamkin,' The Terror of Countless Nurseries'", in Roger de V. Renwick and Sigrid Reiwerts, eds. Ballad Mediations: Folksongs Recovered, Represented, and Reimagined (Wissenschaftlichter Verlag Trier, 2006). Jon Bartlett has also published widely in the Canada Folk Bulletin and Canadian Folk Music/Musique folklorique canadienne. In addition, with Rika Ruebsaat, he has produced a number of recordings, including Steveston Bound (2006), Come to Me in Canada (2004), The Young Man from Canada (2003), RCI, Songs and Stories of Canada, Radio Canada International set of 4 LPs, (1983), The Green Fields of Canada (1982).

Presentation Abstract:

Burns in British Columbia
This paper will examine the influence of Burns' oeuvre on the ways that British Columbians have historically shaped their own culture. James Anderson, for example, fashioned numerous items during the Cariboo gold rush of the early 1860's that can be linked to Burns, and many other cultural artifacts inspired or informed by Burns were produced in other parts of the province during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accounts of Burns suppers as well as songs and poems styled after Burns' material will be examined and interrogated. A comparison will be made between the Burns-based compositions and those based on other models, such as hymns and Tin Pan Alley songs, in an effort to understand the degree to which social class determined the proliferation of Burns material.

Fiona Black, Director of School of Information Management and Associate Dean, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University

Selected Publications:

Co-Editor, History of the Book in Canada, Volume 2, 1840-1918, Yvan Lamonde, Patricia L. Fleming and Fiona A. Black, eds. (U of Toronto P, 2005); "The Circulation of Books and Print: Importation and Book Availability," History of the Book in Canada Volume 1: Beginnings to 1840, Patricia Fleming and Gilles Gallichan, eds. (U of Toronto P, 2003); "'Advent'rous Merchants and Atlantic Waves:' A Preliminary Study of the Scottish Contribution to Book Availability in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1752-1810," Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory, Michael Vance and Marjorie Harper, eds. (Fernwood Publishing; John Donald, 1999); "Book Distribution to the Scottish and Canadian Provinces, 1750-1820: Examples of Methods and Availability," The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Book, Peter Isaac and Barry McKay, eds. (St. Paul's Bibliographies; Oak Knoll Press, 1998).

Presentation Abstract:

Mapping the Bard in Transatlantic Print Culture
Published editions of Burns poems arrived in North America within weeks of coming off the presses in Britain. Their availability was advertised in Colonial newspapers. Within two years of the Kilmarnock edition's publication, printers and publishers in New York and Philadelphia were competing with British editions by distributing their own across North America. Nevertheless, by far the majority of editions of poetry broadsides and collections of Burns were published in Glasgow or London and exported either from printers/ publishers to colonial booksellers or through the intermediary of general merchants and wholesaling warehouses. This paper, building on the author's earlier published work on book availability in Georgian Canada, and with the History of the Book in Canada project, focuses on selected Canadian and American towns in the period 1786 to 1914, and analyses the availability in print of Burns' work, imitations of it, and commentaries on it.

Valentina Bold, Head of Scottish Studies, University of Glasgow, Dumfries Crichton Campus

Selected Publications:

James Hogg: A Bard of Nature's Making (Peter Lang, 2007); Smeddum. A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology (Canongate, 2001);"'Neither right spelt nor right setten doun': Child, Scott and the Hogg family ballads," The Ballad in Scottish History, ed. Edward Cowan, (Tuckwell Press, 2000); Northern Folk: Living Traditions of North East Scotland (CD-rom)(University of Aberdeen, 1999) co-edited with Thomas A. McKean; "'Inmate of the Hamlet': Burns as 'Heaven-taught ploughman,'" Love and Liberty. Robert Burns: A Bicentenary Celebration, ed. Kenneth Simpson (Tuckwell Press, 1997); "James Hogg and the Scottish Self Taught Tradition," The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (John Clare Society and the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994).

Presentation Abstract:

'Hooked' by Robert Burns: Scottish Identity in South Carolina
This paper explores the function of Burns and, in particular, Burns suppers in South Carolina. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1998 and 2001, and follow-up work between 2001 and 2007, it focuses on the experiences of the diaspora community in Columbia. In this context, Burns Suppers are a key Scottish calendar custom, along with Tartan Day, Highland Games and St Andrews Night, creating a coherent identity which can exist, comfortably, alongside existing allegiances to South Carolina and the United States. The paper will explore the ways in which, further to this phenomenon, Burns becomes a malleable symbol of Scotland, past and present, in ways that are culturally adapted to local contexts. Burns Suppers can function as rites of passage for the diaspora Scot, often satisfying preconceptions, and needs, within this community. The figure of Burns, in short, operates both as a receptacle and transmitter of key notions of Scottish identity.

Gerard Carruthers, Reader and Head of Department, Scottish Literature and Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow

Selected Publications:

Editor, forthcoming online edition of the letters of James Currie, Burns's first editor; Editor, Edinburgh University Press Companion to Burns, (forthcoming); Editor, The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007); Robert Burns (Northcote Publishing, 2006); Editor, Burns: Poems (Alfred Knopf,2006); Co-Editor, Walter Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh UP, 2004); Co-Editor, English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge UP, 2003).

Presentation Abstract:

Robert Burns in North America 1790-1820
Unlike numerous Scots and Ulster-Scots poets during the 1790s suspected of, or implicated in, reformist activity, Robert Burns was not driven into exile in cities like Philadelphia. However, these émigré poetic activists often took with them ideas of Burns extending to the republishing of his poetry in North American periodicals. This paper examines such early North American Burns related activity before analyzing the usage made of Burns by journalists and politicians in the early nineteenth-century American Republic. The comparative use of Burns in the English-speaking parts of Canada in the same period is drawn upon.

David Chariandy, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University

Selected Publications:

Soucouyant (2007) [longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize]. "David Chariandy: Afro-Canadian Novelist and Essayist. A Special Section" Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 801-835; "The Fiction of Belonging: Second Generation Black Writing in English Canada" Callaloo 30.3 (Summer 2007): 824-835; "Postcolonial Diasporas," Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2005/2006) http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/pocol/index.php; "That's What You Want, Isn't It? Austin Clarke and the Politics of Recognition" The Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1-2 (November 2005): 79-103.

Presentation Abstract:

Scottish and Caribbean Diasporic Connections
This presentation at the roundtable on "Diasporic Connections" will discuss the history and politics of the Caribbean diaspora, especially in Canada, aiming to draw connections and point out differences between the Caribbean and Scottish diasporic experiences and literary representations of those experiences.

Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature, St. Andrews University

Selected Publications:

Scotland's Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (Penguin, 2007); Apollos of the North (Polygon, 2006); Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford UP, 2006); The Book of St Andrews (Polygon, 2005); Heaven-Taught Fergusson (Tuckwell, 2003); The Modern Poet (Oxford UP, 2001); Devolving English Literature (2nd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2000); Co-Editor, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Penguin,2000); Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (EdinburghUP, 1997); The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge UP, 1998); Full Volume (Cape,2008); Selected Poems (Cape, 2005); The Tip of My Tongue (Cape, 2003); A Scottish Assembly (Chatto,1990); Sharawaggi (Polygon, 1990).

Public Lecture

Robert Crawford will be reading from and discussing his forthcoming biography of Robert Burns (Cape, forthcoming 2009).

Leith Davis, Professor of English Literature and Director, Scottish Studies Centre, Simon Fraser University

Selected Publications:

Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724-1874 (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Co-Ed., Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005); "From Fingal's Harp to Flora's Song: Scotland, Music and Romanticism," The Wordsworth Circle (Spring, 2000), 93-97; "Gender and the Nation in the Work of Robert Burns and Janet Little," Studies in English Literature (Autumn, 1998), 621-645; Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 (Stanford UP, 1998); "The Politics of Hypochondriasis: James Currie's Works of Robert Burns," Studies in Romanticism 32 (Spring, 1997), 43-60; "`Bounded to a District Space': Burns, Wordsworth and the Margins of English Literature," English Studies in Canada 20:1 (March, 1994), 23-40.

Presentation Abstract:

Bringing it All Back Home: Burns, Tourism and the Diasporic Gaze
This paper considers the ricochet effect of the image of Burns: the impact of Burns's appeal abroad on the image of contemporary Scotland. It has been argued that "migrant, ethnic / diasporic, transnational communities" experience their "locality" of origin "symbolically." This paper focuses on the symbolic use made of the figure of Burns in the 2009 "Homecoming" Celebrations sponsored by the Scottish government, noting the contradictions of deploying the figure of an eighteenth-century poet to promote business interests and the image of a modern Scotland. Based on this case study and recent film theory, I discuss the "Diasporic Gaze," suggesting that for members of the diaspora Scotland serves as a site of scopic desire. This gaze, splitting both observer and observed, threatens to fix Scotland as a permanent site of nostalgia. Burns's work, however, can offer a way out of this binary opposition.

Ray Eagle

Ray Eagle will be contributing to the “Community Research Forum: Burns in BC,” Wed. April 8, 3:45-5:00 p.m.

Carole Gerson, Professor of English Literature, Simon Fraser University

Selected Publications:

Editor, History of the Book in Canada, vol 3 (1918-80) (U. of Toronto Press; PUM, 2007); "Design and Ideology in A Pocketful of Canada," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (PBSC), 44:2 (Fall 2006): 65-85; E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Gerson and VeronicaStrong-Boag (U of Toronto P, 2002); (with Veronica Strong-Boag) Paddling Her Own Canoe: Times and Texts E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (U of Toronto P, 2000); Roland Graeme: Knight. By Agnes Maule Machar, 1892. Introduced and annotated by Carole Gerson (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1996).

Presentation Abstract:

In a 1908 poll conducted by the Toronto Globe, Burns held the middle rank among readers’ favourite poets – behind Tennyson, Shakespeare, Browning and Longfellow, but ahead of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Milton. Some of this popularity may be attributed to a sense of nostalgia among the large proportion of Canadians whose families had immigrated from Scotland. As well, Burns was a common reference point among Canada’s social reformers, from all social classes. Working-class organizer Marie Joussaye adulated Burns in “Two Poets” (1895), her poem contrasting the obscurity of Browning with the accessibility of Burns, a “hardy, humble ploughman of the soil” whose “name was known in palace and in cot” because his poems represented “The grandest thoughts couched in the simplest words.” This paper will trace and analyze Burns’s enduring presence in several interweaving strands of Canadian cultural history: nostalgia for the Old World; representations of ethnicity through the use of dialect and romanticization of poverty; and advocacy of the rights of workers and common folk. Along with literary criticism, sources will include labour history, folklore studies, and readership studies.

David Hamilton, Lecturer, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; Tutor, Music School of Douglas Academy; Director of Music, St Mary's Episcopal Church, Hamilton

Selected Publications:

The Organ Music of Dietrich Buxtehude on Divine Art (2007)

Presentation:

David Hamilton will be accompanying Dr. Kirsteen McCue on piano for the public recital.

Nigel Leask, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, Department of English, School of English and Scottish Language and Literature, University of Glasgow

Selected Publications:

"Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart and the Philosophy of Common Sense," Romantic Empiricism and the Scottish Common Sense Tradition, ed. Gavin Budge, (Bucknell, 2007);"Shadowlines: Currie's Burns and British Romanticism," Romanticism's Debateable Lands, ed. Mike Rossington and Claire Lamont (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Co-Editor, Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2004); Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel-Writing, 1770-1840 (Oxford UP, 2002); Editor, S.T.Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (J.M.Dent, 1997); The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).

Presentation Abstract:

Burns and Latin America
Burns's poetry wasn't translated into Spanish until 1919 (Scott's Ivanhoe was translated in 1825, and the Talisman in 1826). Yet in 'Address of Beelzebub' Burns compares the President of the Highland Society to the Spanish Conquistadores Almagro and Pizarro, and he was evidently familiar with the history of the Spanish Conquest of America through William Robertson's History of America and Histoire des Incas de Peru, among the books in his possession at the time of his death. This paper will explore Burns's connections with the Latin America republics in the era of their independence struggle against colonial Spain.

Christine Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University

Selected Publications:
"Troubling the Mosaic: Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences," Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, ed. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn (forthcoming Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008), 308-42; "Feminist and Regionalist Modernisms: Contemporary Verse and Canadian Modernist Poetry," Wider; Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry, ed. Di Brandt and Barbara Godard (forthcoming Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008); "Rita Wong's Monkeypuzzle and the Poetics of Social Justice," Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (March 2008): 58-73; "Cultural Copyright: Editorial Conflict and Women's Press," Open Letter 10th Series No. 4 (Fall 2004): 38-47; "Signifying the Nation: Gabriel Dumont, Harry Robinson, and the Canadian Captivity Narrative," Studies in Canadian Literature 28.1 (2003): 90-108.

Presentation Abstract:

Asian Diasporic Culture
This presentation will outline some of the key features of the literature and culture of the Asian diaspora in Canada and the United States in an attempt to establish a context for comparing them with the literature and culture of the Scottish diaspora. It will also discuss the confluence and divergence of ideas of diaspora and postcolonialism as applied to post-national writing.

Susan Manning, Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh

Selected Publications:

Co-Editor, Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh UP, 2007); Co-Editor, Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2006); Co-Editor, Enlightenment and Emancipation (Bucknell UP, 2006); Co-Editor, Symbiosis Special Numbers, Across the Great Divide, 8.1 and 8.2 (2004); Editor, The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Oxford UP, 2002); Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Palgrave 2002); Editor, Julia de Roubigné, by Henry Mackenzie (Tuckwell, 1999); The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 1990).

Presentation Abstract:

Transatlantic Romantic Biography and the Life of Burns
'I shall ask what it means to map a poetic afterlife; more particularly, to map a spatially translated afterlife. When we trace the transatlantic editions and biographies of Burns we get some measure of the popularity of the poet; the fact that people, often not wealthy, thought it worth their while to fork out sometimes substantial sums from meagre resources to acquire a relic of the national bard of a faraway land. These records enable us to infer quite a lot about migration patterns, the reading habits of emigrants, the material forms of tradition and transmission, and many other things. They don’t, however, tell us about affect, except in a quantitative sense: there’s clearly a lot of it about, around Burns in the nineteenth century. How can we tell what ‘Burns’ meant to his transatlantic readers? To approach this question I look closely at some textual appropriations of both Burns’s poetry and his life.'

Kirsteen McCue, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Associate Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow

Selected Publications:

"'An individual flowering on a common stem': melody, performance and National Song," Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland," eds. Philip Connell & Nigel Leask (Cambridge UP, 2008, in press); with Janette Currie) "Editing the Text and Music of James Hogg's Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd (1831),"Scottish Studies Review 8 (Autumn 2007), 54-68; "Schottische Lieder ohne Worte? : what happened to thewords for the Scots song arrangements by Beethoven and Weber?," Scotland in Europe, eds. Tom Hubbard & R.D.S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 119-136; Joseph Haydn Werke Reihe XXXII, Band 4: Volksliederbeiarbeitungen Nr. 269-364 Schottische Lieder fur George Thomson, eds. Marjorie Rycroft, Kirsteen McCue, Warwick Edwards (Munich: Henle Verlag, 2004).

Presentation Abstract:

Serge Hovey's 'Robert Burns Songbook'

Many composers across the globe have been inspired by the lyrics of Robert Burns and have set them accordingly. But there is one transatlantic project that stands above all others: the Burns settings of Americancomposer Serge Hovey (1920-1989) - a collection of 324 songs which occupied Hovey for over thirty years. After a friend introduced him to Burns's bawdy songs, Hovey felt "a magnetic attraction" to the Scottish poet. Hovey's musical imagination was inspired by the melodies for these songs, which took him to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, the first musical publication of Burns's songs in his lifetime. This essay argues that Hovey's detailed research into the musical context of these songs is unrivalled by any other musician and that his commentaries provide us with an insight into his working practice as an American composer coming face-to-face with a 200 year old Scottish song tradition.

Carol McGuirk, Professor, Department of English, Florida Atlantic University

Selected Publications: Editor, Critical Essays on Robert Burns (Twayne, 1998); "Haunted by Authority: Nineteenth-century Americn Constructions of Robert Burns and Scotland," Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, ed. Robert Crawford (U of Iowa P, 1997);"George Thomson and Robert Burns: With Friends Like These," Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 9 (1995): 16-20; "Places in the Peasant Heart: Robert Burns's Scotland, Stephen Foster's American South, and Walt Disney's World," Scotlands 2.2 (1995): 11-35; Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1994); "Burns and Nostalgia," Burns Now, ed. Kenneth Simpson (Canongate; 1994), 31-69; "Scottish Hero, Scottish Victim: Myths of Robert Burns," The History of Scottish Literature, II: 1660-1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen UP, 1987); Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (U of Georgia P, 1985)

Presentation Abstract:

Burns and Aphorism This essay considers the tension between lyric ambiguity in Burns and the “aphoristic” destination of many of his famous phrases. Burns’s vernacular predecessor Allan Ramsay published a collection of Scottish folk aphorisms in the 1720s, and I consider Burns’s writings that draw from these old Scots adages as well as some that he himself devised. Burns, when considered in full poetic and biographical context, is a notably ambiguous and elusive figure; but snippets and simple phrases from Burns have established a separate afterlife as repositories of folk “wisdom.” Famous lines from Burns (“The best-laid schemes of mice an’ men/Gang aft agley”; “Oh, wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us”; “man’s inhumanity to man, etc.”) have a double history. They are powerful lines in poetic context but they also live on also as wise sayings to be recycled in such compendia as Bartlett’s Familliar Quotations, whose numerous quotations from Burns will be briefly discussed. Burns’s aphorisms surface in many levels of popular culture. Surveying popular culture for its frequent recyclings of Burns’s sayings, I also read these famous-sayings back into their original poetic context, considering how posterity has edited and recast Burns, but also how the poet complicates “folk wisdom” when he invokes it in his poems and songs.

Holly Faith Nelson, Associate Professor and Interim Chair and Graduate Stream Coordinator, English Department; Co-Director, Gender Studies Institute, Trinity Western University

Selected Publications:

Co-Ed., James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (forthcoming Ashgate, 2009); Co-Ed., Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (Broadview Press, 2005); Co-Ed., Of Paradise and Light (U of Delaware P, 2004); "'The Science of Nature: Colonial Resistance in Hogg's "The Pongos,"' James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace (forthcoming Ashgate, 2009) (with S. Alker); "Memory, Monuments, and Melancholy Genius in Margaret Cavendish's 'Bell in Campo,'" Eighteenth Century Fiction 21.1(2008): 13-35 (with S. Alker);"Staging the Shifting Nation: Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union," Studies in English Literature 47.2 (Spring 2007): 379-401 (with S. Alker); "James Hogg as Working Class Autobiographer: Tactical Maneuvers in a 'Memoir of the Author's Life,'" Studies in Hogg and His World 16 (2006): 63-79 (with S. Alker).

Presentation Abstract:

Andrew Noble >

Selected Publications:

"Burns, Scotland and Russia," Russian Settings of Robert Burns (Toccata Classics, 2008); "Displaced Persons:Burns and the Renfrew Radicals." Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. R Harris (Edinburgh2002): 196-225; The Canongate Burns. eds. A. Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg (Canongate U.S., 2002);"Wordsworth and Burns: the anxiety of being under the influence," Critical Essays on Robert Burns. ed.McGuirk, Carol (G.K. Hall, 1998): 49-62; "Burns and Scottish Nationalism," Burns Now. ed. Simpson, Kenneth (Canongate, 1994): 167-92; From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson's Emigrant Journey(Aberdeen University Press, 1985); Robert Louis Stevenson. (London, 1983); The Art of Robert Burns. eds. A.Noble and Ronald D. S. Jack (Vision Press, 1982); Edwin Muir, Uncollected Scottish Criticism. ed. A. (Vision Press, 1982).

Presentation Abstract:

Burns, Scotland and the American Revolution This essay will consider the mixed impact of the American Revolution on late-eighteenth-century Scottish society. In so doing, it will provide the necessary context for Burns's comprehensive sense of the fundamental nature and, hence, the profound political consequences of that revolution for Scotland's future political identity. An examination of relevant poems will reveal not only the allusively, tellingly detailed remarks on matters American diffused throughout Burns's poetry and letters but also the fact that America, arguably more than France, is the model polis which, tragically, pan-British radical politics cannot attain. This will be demonstrated a detailed reading of the relation, hitherto un-noted, between Paine's 1775 poem Liberty Tree and Burns's The Tree of Liberty and Ode on General Washington's Birthday.

Emma Pink, Ph.D. Candidate, English Department, Simon Fraser University, and Laura E. Ralph, M.A. Candidate (English Stream), English Department, Trinity Western University

Selected Publications:

Emma Pink, "Frances Burney's Camilla: 'to print my Grand Work...by subscription.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 2006 Fall; 40 (1): 51-68.

Presentation Abstract:

Robert Burns and Caribbean Culture
The Scots played an important role in the Jamaican plantations; Robert Burns even intended to go there at one point in order to improve his finances. Although Burns never made it in person across to the Caribbean, his work did. This paper presents preliminary research on the reception of Burns in the Caribbean.

Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Associate Dean (Research), University of Glasgow

Presentation Abstract:

Slavery as a Political Metaphor in Scotland and Ireland in the Age of Burns: As well as a dreadful transnational reality and source of extensive policy debate, slavery was also a major literary, political, religious and social metaphor in the age of Burns. This essay will examine the metaphor of slavery in Burns in the context of its use by the United Irishmen, whose poets and writers -- Orr and Drennan --in the north of the island had a close relationship to Burns and provided a highly politicized environment for his early reception on the island of Ireland. In the UI context, the apparent voluntary consent to slavery mourned by Burns was less important, because they were on the verge of a real insurrection, and the connection between "Irish oppression, British imperialism and the enslavement of Africa" made by Hugh Mulligan and others was more of a stimulant to action than an acknowledgement of defeat.

Selected Publications:

The Road to Independence: Scotland Since the Sixties (Reaktion and Chicago UP, 2008); Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford UP, 2008); Editor, The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (Continuum, 2007); James Boswell (Aberdeen: AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2007); Co-editor, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2006); A New History of Scotland (Sutton, 2003); Editor, James Hogg: Jacobite Relics (Edinburgh UP, 2002-3; 2 vols.); Scottish Nationality (Palgrave Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 2001); The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh and Columbia UP, 1995; 2009).

Laura Ralph

Laura Ralph is an M.A. student at Trinity Western University. She volunteered at the conference Through A Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime, held at TWU in May, 2007. As a research assistant of Dr. Jens Zimmermann, a Canada Research Chair at TWU, she has worked on several forthcoming collections of scholarly essays (e.g. Heidegger und die Dichtung- Heidegger and Poetics-forthcoming Rodopi).

Michael Vance, Associate Professor, Department of History, Saint Mary's University, Halifax

Selected Publications:

"Mon- he's a gran' fish": Scots in British Columbia's Interwar Fishing Industry,” BC Studies, no. 158 (Summer 2008): 33-60; Co-Editor, William Wye Smith: Recollections of a Nineteenth-Century Scottish Canadian (Natural Heritage Books, 2008); "A Brief History of Organized Scottishness in Canada," Transatlantic Scots, ed. C. Ray (U of Alabama P, 2005), 96-119; "Powerful Pathos: The Triumph of Scottishness in Nova Scotia," Transatlantic Scots, ed. C. Ray (U of Alabama P, 2005), 156-179. Co-Editor, Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia c.1600 -1990 (John Donald and Fernwood Publishing, 1999).

Presentation Abstract:

Burns in the Park: A Tale of Three Monuments
This paper will explore the history behind the erection of three statues of Robert Burns in Canada: the first in Allan Gardens, Toronto (1902), the second in Victoria Park, Halifax (1919) and the third in Stanley Park, Vancouver (1928). It will identify the groups responsible for erecting each monument, discuss each statue's iconography and physical placement, and explore the social context for each unveiling. It will also place these monuments in an international context, drawing comparisons with monuments erected in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The history of these statues provides insight into the transatlantic reception of Robert Burns and into the nature of the colonial societies in which they were erected. For example, despite the egalitarian sentiments expressed at its unveiling and later rededication, the erection of a Burns monument in Stanley Park participated in the erasure of evidence of the long-standing indigenous presence on the peninsula.