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~ Supported By ~
Centre
for Scottish Studies, Simon
Fraser University
Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada
Vancouver Burns Club
Centre for Scottish Studies,
Simon
Fraser University
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
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Robert Burns in a Transatlantic Context
-- April 7- 9, 2009
Simon Fraser
University, Harbour Centre
2009 marks the 250th anniversary
of the birth of Robert Burns. Recognizing Burns’s
global importance and hoping to attract members of the diaspora
back to Scotland to celebrate his birthday, the Scottish government
has also declared 2009 to be the year of Homecoming; Burns is, after
all, worth 157 million pounds a year to the Scottish economy. The Centre for Scottish Studies is
celebrating Burns this year by hosting a series of public events and an
academic workshop on Robert Burns in
a Transatlantic Context which
will highlight Burns in the Americas, where he has had arguably his greatest
impact.
Public Events:
PUBLIC EVENTS
Robert Burns in a
Transatlantic Context will feature a number of public events:
a musical celebration of Burns in North America featuring Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat, Kirsteen McCue and
David Hamilton and a special mini-Gung
Haggis Fat Choy celebration; a lecture
by Dr. Robert Crawford on his new biography of Burns, The Bard; a
panel on “Connecting Diasporas: Scotland, Asia and the Caribbean”; and a
Community Research Forum on “Burns in BC.”
ACADEMIC WORKSHOP
The academic workshop
will respond to the recent surge of interest in transatlantic studies,
seeking to employ emergent concepts from this new field in order to analyze
Burn’s uses in the Americas. The Robert
Burns in a Transatlantic Context workshop represents a
transatlantic process in its own right, as it draws recognized scholars from
Scotland, the United States and Canada together to reflect on the phenomenon
of Robert Burns in transatlantic culture.
The
objectives of the Robert Burns in a
Transatlantic Context workshop are: to advance the fields of late
eighteenth-century and Scottish studies by focusing on Burns from the
perspective of the new field of transatlantic studies; and to publish the
first collection of essays to consider the subject of Burns’s
dissemination and reception in the Americas both historically and up to the
present.
The workshop will focus on five research issues in regard
to Burns and transatlanticism:
a. Burns’s involvement in the eighteenth-century
transatlantic exchange of ideas;
b. The publication and circulation
of Burns’s work in the Americas;
c. The
impact of Burns in Canada, the United States, and Central and South America
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
d. The
cultural uses made of Burns today (in the form of Burns Clubs, Burns Suppers,
Tartan Days, etc);
e. the
relationship between the culture of the Scottish diaspora
and that of other diasporas
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