Presenters at “Unsettling Scottish Studies: Canons, Chronologies, Colonialisms”
Simon Fraser University, Nov. 22-23
Sharon Alker is the Mary A. Denny Professor of English at Whitman College. She has published on a wide variety of authors, often with Holly Faith Nelson; these authors include James Hogg, John Galt, Mary Brunton, Daniel Defoe, Margaret Cavendish, Maria Edgeworth, and William Shakespeare. With Holly Faith Nelson, she published Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722 with McGill University Press (2021). Her most recent publication is a scholarly edition of John Galt's Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk (Edinburgh University Press) released this year. She is currently beginning a new project on penal transportation to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Delaney Anderson is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Master of Arts in English program and currently lives in Vancouver on the traditional and unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, near the ancestral Squamish village of Sen̓áḵw. Her research explores how Scottish author John Galt’s fiction was reprinted in nineteenth-century British colonial newspapers across the empire - from Upper Canada to Jamaica - and mobilized by editors for a wide variety of ideological purposes. She has worked as a research assistant for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt and has presented her work at the North American Victorian Studies Association (2022) and North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (2023) conferences.
Michael Brown holds a chair in history at the University of Aberdeen, where he is also director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. His work primarily concerns the eighteenth century, and he is the author of The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016) and biographical studies of Francis Hutcheson and John Toland. He has served on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies and is the general editor of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies. His most recent publication (edited with Jack A Hill), Adam Ferguson and the Politics of Virtue (2023), is available open access from Aberdeen University Press. He is currently writing a study of British political culture from 1707 to 1800 entitled ‘Between The Unions’. He is also editing (with Karin Friedrich), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Enlightenment.
Leith Davis is a professor in the Department of English and Director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford University Press, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725-1875 (Notre Dame University Press, 2005), as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012) and The International Companion to Scottish Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century (ASLS, 2021). Her most recent book, Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion was published in 2021 with Cambridge University Press. She is also Principal Investigator of the “Lyon in Mourning” and "Early Circus" Digital Humanities projects.
Angela Esterhammer is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her book publications include The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2000); Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (Cambridge UP, 2008); and most recently Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (Cambridge UP, 2020). Her research interests include late-Romantic print culture, performance, periodicals, and fiction. She is General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt and is currently working on volumes containing Galt’s Transatlantic Tales and Essays and International Tales.
Nathaniel Harrington (he/him) is an "independent scholar" (read: unemployed) with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. His current research examines the use of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, and horror) by denied-language writers (Anishinaabemowin, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh) and by Black and Indigenous writers to explore the experiences of language death and linguistic marginalization; he is also working on a critical history of the "Celtic fantasy" genre. His other interests include the work of Miguel de Unamuno, the relationships between oral and written literatures, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, and meeting new cats.
Euan Healey is a PhD Candidate in History and Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, currently based at Simon Fraser University on the unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations as a visiting researcher. His work explores interconnections between work and environment, specifically engaging with these themes in the context of the Gaelic-speaking people who experienced the Scottish Highland Clearances. As a way to consider these themes he is exploring popular experience of changes in subsistence economy during this period particularly related to fishing, following a successful Master of Research project focused on subsistence agriculture. While based in Canada, Euan is exploring connections between his own research and indigenous methods and stories.
Nikki Hessell is a Pākehā (settler) scholar and Professor of English Literatures at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of numerous books and articles on Romanticism, settler colonialism, and Indigenous writing and reception, including Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations (2018) and Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (2021). Her current project is The Poetics of Treaties: Settler Treaty-Making and Eighteenth-Century Poetry.
Kevin James is Professor of History, Scottish Studies Foundation Chair, and Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph. In addition to books and articles on Irish and Scottish economic and social history, he has published widely on Scottish tourism history and the history of hotels, and is co-editor, with Eric G.E. Zuelow, of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Tourism History. Amongst his current projects are a large-scale study of the ‘Many Lives of Duff House’ in the twentieth century, and a collaboration with scholars at the Open University in Scotland and Glasgow City Archives on ‘Music in the Parks’—an exploration of public music performances in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Tony Jarrells is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature and the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817-1825, and of a forthcoming EUP edition of John Galt’s Scottish Tales. Recent work includes essays on Galt, Walter Scott, the Scottish urban novel, and regionalism. He is currently working on a book on literature and the history of values, tentatively titled “Eighteenth-Century Values.” Since 2014 he has co-edited Studies in Scottish Literature with Patrick Scott.
Dana Graham Lai is a Ph.D. student in Simon Fraser University’s Department of English. She holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Trinity Western University and an M.A. in English Literature from Carleton University. Her research is situated in Romanticism and theories of place, nationhood, Scottish women’s writing, and ecocriticism. She is the research assistant for Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks, edited by Leith Davis and Kevin James (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press). Dana is also the reviews editor for Studies in Hogg and his World. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and SFU’s Mary and David MacAree Fellowship. Dana lives on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of Kwikwetlem First Nations and is from Taqamiku’jk/Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, the ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
Jeremy Laity is currently a master’s student in history at Trinity Western University where his research focuses on Indigenous history and early Indigenous/settler relationships. As a person of Indigenous descent, his interests are informed by a personal connection to the subject, as well as a desire to advance reconciliation through education and research. His recent projects include an article on the literary standing of early anthropological texts (currently under review), and his final paper which examines the ways in which early agricultural settlers interacted with Indigenous people in British Columbia. Jeremy is a member of the Tla’amin nation, which is located on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, just north of Powell River.
Kaitlyn MacInnis (she/her) grew up as a Settler in Ladner on scəw̓aθən (Tsawwassen) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) land in Ladner, and now lives in Vancouver on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) land. As far as her knowledge goes, her ancestors all came from Britain and Ireland. She completed her BA and MA (with a thesis on Scottish Jacobitism, memory, and old age) at Simon Fraser University, and has returned for a PhD focused on Animal History through a Critical Animal Studies framework. She has also worked as a research assistant for projects on representations of Christ in Scotland, Scottish settler-colonialism in British Columbia, and the Lyon in Mourning manuscript.
Andrew Mackillop is an historian of Scotland during the 'long eighteenth century' (c.1690-1830). His interests focus on the mutually constitutive dynamics between Scotland's simultaneous involvement in British state formation and global empire in this period. With a particular concentration on the emergent empire in Asia, his research considers how the 'provincial' parts of the British and Irish Isles developed distinctive responses to the opportunities and pressures generated by Britain's global colonialism. Among his recent articles are 'Regional Perspectives on Global Empire: The North East of Scotland and Pre-1815 British Imperialism', Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 11 (2024) and ‘Before Bell: Commerce, Scots Law, and the British Empire’ in A Wilson and J Hardman (eds), New Perspectives on George Joseph Bell and the Development of Scots Commercial Law to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.
Sophie McCall is a settler scholar and Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (UBC P, 2011), nominated for the Gabrielle Roy Prize and the Canada Prize. She is the editor of Anahareo's Devil in Deerskins (U Manitoba P, 2014), the first book-length life narrative published by an Indigenous woman author in Canada, and and co-editor of several collections of essays, stories, and visual arts. Since 2017 she and Deanna Reder have worked together as co-chairs of the Indigenous Voices Awards (www.indigenousvoicesawards.org). They also co-edited the anthology Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wilfred Laurier UP 2017). Her current book project (with NunatuKavut scholar Kristina Bidwell) is In Collaboration: Building Collaborative Futures in Indigenous Literary Arts.
Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow were she was Associate and then Co -Director of the award-winning Centre for Robert Burns Studies (2007-22). She has published widely on Romantic song culture, including essays on Lord Byron and John Clare, and on Robert Burns’s songs and musical responses to Burns’s work. She is editor of two editions of songs by James Hogg for the Stirling/South Carolina research edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (EUP 2014) and co-editor, with Pam Perkins, of Women’s Travel Writings in Scotland (Routledge 2017). Her edition of Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson, vol 4. of the Oxford Works of Robert Burns, appeared in 2021. Between 2017-2019 she led a network of scholars working on British National Song culture during the period 1750–1850, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh ( the Romantic National Song Network) and she has led the relaunch of the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation, another RSE network, between 2021-23.
Dr. Amy Parent, Noxs Ts'aawit is from the Nisga'a Nation. She is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Education & Governance (Tier 2) in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (Ph.D., UBC). Amy is also Co-Chair of the Indigenous Research Leadership Circle with the Tri-Council Agency (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) and the Inaugural Associate Director for the SFU Cassidy Centre for Educational Justice. In 2023, she received the B.C. Historical Foundation Certificate of Merit with the N’isjoohl rematriation delegation team, which recognized their collective work to bring her family’s memorial pole back to its rightful place in the Nisga’a Nation after being stolen for 94 years. In 2024, Amy was named the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia “Distinguished Academic of the Year" for her research project that informed the Ni'isjoohl rematriation. [If you need any other bio details, they can be found here https://www.amyparent.ca/biography]
Darryl Peers is a writer from Aberdeenshire. He is an AHRC-funded Creative Writing PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is writing his first novel and a memoir. He is the co-editor of the 'Queer Form in Scottish Writing' special issue of Scottish Literary Review. His fiction has appeared in American Literary Review, The Suburban Review, and other publications. His criticism is forthcoming in The Journal of the Short Story in English, Ali Smith: Critical Essays, and The Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature.
Pam Perkins is a Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba. Her primary research interests include Scottish women writers of the late Enlightenment and Romantic periods and travels around the northern rim of the North Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published on and edited the work of a number of Scottish writers, including Anne Grant, Elizabeth Hamilton, Francis Jeffrey, and
Margaret Oliphant. Her current projects include work on the early nineteenth-century continental travels of two Scottish sisters, Jane and Charlotte Waldie, as well as an edited transcription of the manuscript journals of Sir Thomas Cochrane, describing his travels around the coasts of Newfoundland in the 1820s and 30s. Her interest in the Arctic fiction of Robert Ballantyne grows out of her work on British encounters with the north.
Ella Phillips is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her interdisciplinary research centres around the regulation of women’s bodies in legal and literary cultures with a particular focus on the construction and imposition of ‘rescue’ narratives. She is a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at Simon Fraser University for the fall term where she hopes to gain an insight into narratives of ‘rescue’ imposed on indigenous communities, particularly in Residential Schools, as well as Indigenous counter-narratives. Her research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).
Petra Johana Poncarová is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Glasgow, working on a project which explores Gaelic magazines founded by Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar and their impact on Gaelic literature and Scottish nationalism (erskine.glasgow.ac.uk). She serves as secretary of the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (iassl.org) and as one of the co-directors of Ionad Eòghainn MhicLachlainn | National Centre for Gaelic Translation (gaelictranslation.org). She was the manager of the 3rd World Congress of Scottish Literatures (Prague, 2022). Her monograph Derick Thomson and the Gaelic Revival was published by Edinburgh University Press in January 2024.
Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) is a Professor in Indigenous Studies and in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on the neglected Indigenous literary archive in lands claimed by Canada (see www.thepeopleandthetext.ca) . She has been collaborating with the amazing Dr. Sophie McCall for over a decade on initiatives designed to establish Indigenous literary studies as essential cores of literature departments across the country, with ambitions for even more subversive action!
Erin Scott (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar who works in time-based mediums, including writing, performance, and video/audio. With publications and performances across forms, they have made spoken word albums, books, exhibitions, drag performances, Fringe shows, scholarly articles, social and community art, videopoems and more. As a PhD student at The University of British Columbia Okanagan, her research enquires about the relationship between land, language, and belonging, noting the parallels and divergences between Scottish Gaelic people and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Using arts-based methods for Gaelic language revitalization, their dissertation proposes complex questions of belonging from a colonized and colonizer perspective. With a focus on the importance of language for diasporic and national Scottish and Canadian identities, her work asks: ‘where do you belong?’. Erin lives on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. Find more here: www.erinhscott.com.
Dr. June Scudeler (Métis) (she/her) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, cross-appointed with the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her research encompasses queer Indigenous studies, literature, film, and art. She is currently delving into Indigenous horror and reseraching represnetnaions of Indigenous peoples in settler American director Kelly Reichardt's films
Sarah Sharp is a lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen and Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. She has previously held funding from bodies including the Irish Research Council, Leverhulme Trust and Fulbright Commission, and positions in New Zealand, Ireland and the USA. Her own research focuses on ideas of nation and identity in nineteenth-century Scottish writing with an increasing focus on transnational and transperipheral contexts. She has published on topics including settler colonialism, migrant diaries and the Scottish-Australian author Catherine Helen Spence. Her first book Kirkyard Romanticism: Death, Modernity and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century was published in September 2024 with Edinburgh University Press.
Juliet Shields is Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, which sits on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish people. She is interested in how understandings of authorship and literature that coalesced in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone world continue to determine what we teach and study today, and in the authors and audiences—then and now—that have challenged those understandings. Her most recent books include Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: the Romance of Everyday Life (2021) and Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (2021). She is working on a biography of Margaret Oliphant for Edinburgh University Press’s Scottish Women Making History series and a study of Walter Scott and race.
Arun Sood is Lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter. Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C; Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress; and Lecturer in Romanticism at the University of Plymouth, following the completion of his AHRC-funded PhD at The University of Glasgow. His most recent articles include a study of Walter Scott’s Waverley in relation to nineteenth-century Cuban anti-slavery literature (Scottish Literary Review, 2024) and an exploration West African oral cultures in Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2023). His books include Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1886, a critical monograph on Robert Burns; New Skin For The Old Ceremony: A Kirtan, a novel set across the Isle of Skye and North India, which was recipient of the 2024 Kavya Book Prize; and Searching Erskine, a non-fiction artbook exploring the intersections between sound, art, ecology, and place released with an audio component. With a particular interest in collaborations, Arun’s research and creative practice is underpinned by varied interests including diaspora, oral cultures, sound, song-collecting, cultural memory, and the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Silke Stroh is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz (Germany). She specialises in postcolonialism, diaspora studies, and the relationship between minority issues and national identity. In this context, she has published widely on various aspects of Scottish literature in English, Scots and Gaelic, from the medieval to the contemporary period. She is the author of Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry (Rodopi 2011) and Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination: Anglophone Writing from 1600 to 1900 (Northwestern University Press 2017), as well as co-editor of Empires and Revolutions: Cunninghame Graham and his Contemporaries (Scottish Literature International 2017) and Mosques, Manses, Muirs, and ‘Moors’: Representations of Muslims and Islam in Scottish Culture (special issue of Scottish Literary Review, 2021). Currently, she is preparing a monograph entitled Narratives of Transmigration: Multiple Movement and Cultures of Memory in the British Colonial Diaspora, as well as a new research project on Black and Asian Scottish literature.
Julianna Wagar (she/her) is a PhD student in the English and Film Studies department at the University of Alberta. She received her MA in English Literature from Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Dr. Leith Davis. Her research is focused on reclaiming women’s romance reading through BookTok and other forms of social media. Her broader research interests include romance novels, women’s reading, contemporary publishing, Scottish romance novels, and intersectional feminism. Julianna has worked as a Research Assistant on “The Lyon in Mourning” Project and the Women’s Print History Project.