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Research Centre for Scottish Studies

Research Centre for Scottish Studies / Unsettling Scottish Studies / Program

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Unsettling Scottish Studies: Canons, Chronologies, Colonialisms

Nov. 22-23, 2024

Room 1400-1420 SFU Harbour Centre 515 West Hastings Street

Friday Nov. 22

— (Academic Symposium/Register as an Audience Member Here) —

[Participants wanting to walk from the Sylvia Hotel, meet with Juliet Shields in the lobby at 7:30 am]

8:00-8:30 am: Registration and coffee

8:30-9:30 am: Land Acknowledgement, Welcome and Introductions

9:30-10:45 am: Unsettling Categories and Concepts: The Historical and Theoretical Construction of Scottish Studies (sponsored by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen)

            Chair: Juliet Shields (U of Washington)

  1. Leith Davis (SFU), “Unsettling Scottish Studies: Starting Places”

  2. Michael Brown (U of Aberdeen), “Unsettling the Scottish Enlightenment”

  3. Silke Stroh (U of Koblenz), “Black and Asian Scottish Writers & and the Diversification of the Canon”

  4. Sarah Sharp (U of Aberdeen), “The New Old Country: Literary Nostalgia and Scottish Settler Colonialism”

  5. Arun Sood, (University of Exeter) “Brown Hebrideans: Unsettling Place, Language, People and Song”

10:45-11:15 am: Break

— (End of Academic Symposium/Ticketed) —

— (Performance/Public: Please Register HERE) —

11:15 am -12:15 pm: Public talk by Stephanie Wood on the recent history of the Squamish people, tiná7 cht ti temíxw (We Come From This Land).

[Welcome by Steeve Mongrain (Associate Dean, Research and International, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)]

— (End of Performance/Public) —

— (Academic Symposium/Register as an Audience Member Here) —

12:15-1:30 pm:  Lunch for presenters

1:30-2:45 pm:  Unsettling Colonialisms 1:  Confronting Scottish Studies and Empire

    Chair: Holly Nelson (Trinity Western U)

  1. Andrew MacKillop (U of Glasgow), “Unsettling Empire, the Empire Angst of Smollett, Galt, and Scott” 

  2. Angela Esterhammer (U of Toronto), “Unsettling Settlement in John Galt’s Transatlantic Tales”

  3. Delaney Anderson, “Cycles of Reprinting and the Unintended Readerships of John Galt’s Short Fiction”

  4. Michael Morris (U of Dundee), “Avowing Slavery in Scottish Studies”

  5. Juliet Shields (U of Washington), “Unsettling Scottish Romanticism: Wedderburn and Hogg”

2:45 pm-4:00 pm:  Unsettling Place: Re-envisioning the Ecologies of Scottish Studies  (sponsored by the James Hogg Society)

    Chair: Angela Esterhammer (U of Toronto) 

  1. Sharon Alker (Whitman College)/Holly Faith Nelson (TWU), “Hogg, Ecology, and the Unsettling of Social Structures”

  2. Kaitlyn MacInnis (SFU), “Centering Sheep in Scottish History" 

  3. Tony Jarrells (U of South Carolina), “Region and Colony in Romantic Scotland”

  4. Euan Healey, (U of Glasgow), “Unsettling Histories of the Highland Clearances from the Soil Upwards”

  5. Alex Dick (UBC), “Walter Scott, The British Fishery Society, and Coastal Poetics”

4:00 pm-4:30 pm: Break

4:30 pm-5:45 pm: Undergraduate Research Presentation and Poster Session: “Unsettling Scottish Studies” with students from English 433W SFU students

5:45-7:00 pm:  Dinner for presenters 

— (End of Academic Symposium/Ticketed) —

— Performance/Public: Please Register HERE —

7:30-9:30 pm:  A cultural celebration: “Storywork: Music and Dance from the Scottish Gaelic and Métis Traditions”: featuring Shot of Scotch Highland Dancers and V’ni Dansi Métis Dancers and musicians. 

— (End of Performance/Public) —

Sat. Nov. 23 

— (Academic Symposium/Register as an Audience Member Here) —

[Participants wanting to walk from the Sylvia Hotel, meet with Juliet Shields in the lobby at 7:30 am]

8:00-8:30 am:  Coffee/Tea for presenters

8:30-9:45 am  Intersections: Indigenous Studies and Scottish Studies 

    Chair: Euan Healey (U of Glasgow)

  1. June Scudeler (SFU), “Indigenous Literary Nationalisms and Ethical Approaches to Indigenous Literatures”

  2. Nikki Hessell (Victoria U of Wellington), “The Course of Time” and Cherokee Sovereignty”

  3. Nathaniel Harrington (St. Francis Xavier), “Gaelic literature and/as Indigenous Literature”

  4. Jeremy Laity (TWU), “ Large in Stature, Dwarfed in Mind: Contact, Conflict, and Claim in the Writing of Eric Duncan”

  5. Don Nerbas (McGill U), “Industrialism, Colonialism, and Region in an Atlantic World: The Other Colliers Across the Sea”

— (End of Academic Symposium/Ticketed) —

9:45-10:45 am: Workshop (Please note: this workshop is for presenters only): Indigenizing the Curriculum (Sophie McCall [Simon Fraser University] and Deanna Reder [Simon Fraser University]) 

10:45-11:15 am:  Break

— Performance/Public: Please register HERE  —

11:15 am-12:15 pm: Annual St. Andrews and Caledonian Lecture

Welcome by Steve Collis, Chair, English Department, Simon Fraser University

Public talk by Nisga’a scholar Dr. Amy Parent/Noxs Ts’aawit (Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Education & Governance in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University) "The Rematriation of the Ni’isjhool Memorial Pole." The pole was stolen in 1929 by Marius Barbeau and sold to National Museums Scotland. It returned to the Nass Valley in 2023. 

12:15-12:45 pm: Performance by the Nisga'a Ts'amiks Vancouver Traditional Dancers

— (End of Performance/Public) —

12:45-1:30 pm:  Lunch for presenters

— (Academic Symposium/Register as an Audience Member Here) —

1:30-2:45 pm: Unsettling Place 2: Disrupting Spatial Geographies

    Chair: Sharon Alker (Whitman College)

  1. Dana Graham Lai (SFU), "’That’s what we wanted!’: Landscape, People, and the Colonial Sublime in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, A.D. 1803”

  2. Erin Scott (UBC), “Dùthchas: Decolonizing Scottish Identity in a Canadian Context”

  3. Petra Johana Poncarová (U of Glasgow), “Global Gaelic Diaspora and Twentieth-Century Gaelic Magazines”

  4. Pam Perkins (U of Winnipeg), “Robert Ballantyne and the Imagined Scottish Arctic”

  5. Kevin James, (University of Guelph), “De-centring and De-territorialising Scottish Histories of Travel”

2:45-4:00 pm:  Unsettling Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality

    Chair: Pam Perkins (U of Manitoba)

  1. Ella Phillips (University of Strathclyde & University of Stirling), “Unsettling Narratives of ‘Rescue’ in Scotland: The Glasgow Magdalene Institution (1859-1870)”

  2. Darryl Peers (Manchester Metropolitan U), “Queerness and Influence in Scottish Fiction”

  3. Kirsteen McCue (U of Glasgow), “Designing a new 'herstory' of Scottish Women's Writing: Challenges & Opportunities”

  4. Julianna Wagar (SFU), “Scottish Romance Novels”

4:00-4:30 pm: Break

4:30-6:00 pm: Unsettling Scottish Studies: Practical Directions Forward (Partnerships, Research Agendas, Pedagogical Strategies): informal discussion and next steps

6:30 pm: Participants will meet for dinner at the Irish Heather (248 East Georgia Street, Vancouver)

*We acknowledge the generous support of the following organizations: the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada; Simon Fraser University’s Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; the Office of the Vice-President, Research, Simon Fraser University; the St. Andrew's and Caledonian Society of Vancouver; the Community Engagement Initiative, Simon Fraser University; the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen; the James Hogg Society.