Join us at our Virtual Scotland Library!
Scotland Hub’s ‘Reading Scotland’ is a virtual community bringing together Germans and Scots and all who have an interest in Scottish life and literature.
Reading Scotland Speakers
Let us know if you have suggestions for a presentation by a specific speaker or would like to give a talk yourself!
Gioia Angeletti is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Parma, Italy. She has published a wide range of essays on nineteenth-century Scottish theatre and poetry, contemporary Scottish theatre, Romantic-period British theatre and poetry, and Anglophone literature of migration and transculturality. Her major authored and edited volumes include: as author, Eccentric Scotland: Three Victorian Poets. James Thomson (“B. V.”), John Davidson and James Young Geddes (2004), Lord Byron and Discourses of Otherness: Scotland, Italy, and Femininity (2012) and Nation, Community, Self: Female Voices in Scottish Theatre from the Late Sixties to the Present (2018); as editor, Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830 (2010), East/West Encounters in Romantic Literature and Culture, an issue of the journal La questione Romantica co-edited with Lilla Maria Crisafulli (2019), and Travel, Migration, Exile, an issue of the journal La questione Romantica co-edited with Michael Bradshaw (2023). She is currently working on an edition of Liz Lochhead’s Dracula, and a book about Scottish Romantic-period migration literature. She is Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. She was awarded the Honourable Mention in the Jack Medal for the 2024 award season by the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literature (IASSL) for the article “Scottish Literature of Migration and Transculturality: Subversive Reticence and Gender Negotiations in Lady Anne Barnard’s Cape Writings”.
This paper contributes to ongoing debates on Scotland’s role in the British Empire by examining how its experience of ‘internal colonialism’ (M. Hechter, 1975) after the 1707 Union shaped its literary engagament with empire and migration during the long eighteenth century. The Scottish Enlightenment’s theories of race and societal ‘progress’ were often entangled in imperial ideology, simultaneously supporting and challenging the logic of colonial domination. Reflecting these contradictions, Scottish literature of the period frequently served as a medium through which writers negotiated tensions between Enlightenment ideals and imperial realities. Focusing on three figures – John Leyden in India (1803-1811), and Lady Anne Barnard (1797-1802) and Thomas Pringle (1820-1826) in South Africa – this paper explores how their works register these negotiations. Drawing on transcultural and migration studies, I examine how their representations of both human and nonhuman Others complicate simplistic binaries such as colonizer/colonized and domestic/exotic. By situating these writers within broader networks of cultural exchange and imperial power, this study reveals how Scottish literature grapples with the ambiguities of national identity, moral responsibility, and colonial encounter – tensions that continue to resonate in postcolonial discourse today.
Cordula Lemke teaches English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published in the fields of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies and 19th to 21st century literature. Her publications include a book on notions of experience in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson. She is currently finishing a book on Scottish hospitality around 1800.
Scottish folktales have always been haunted by ghosts, murderers, the odd witch and tales of witchcraft. Witch hunts have been part of Scottish cultural memory since James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Scotland. His reign started a veritable witch craze when he accused Scottish women of riding the waves in sieves and conjuring up a storm that almost led to his and his new Danish wife’s death by drowning. From then on around 3000 women and men were executed under accusations of witchcraft. Today, the campaign “Witches of Scotland” has made it their goal to remember these women and men who dies for acting as healers, for being loud or uncomfortable, or for simply being different. In my paper I want to take a look at witchcraft in literature around 1800 and then trace the way Geilis Duncan – one of the first Scottish witches to die – has been immortalised in literature and popular culture today.
Stewart Whyte, born in Irvine, North Ayrshire to Don Whyte (1926-1996), author and journalist, and Nan Caldwell (1922-1995), violinist and teacher. Grandson of Ian Whyte (1901-1960), composer and conductor. Stewart Whyte grew up in Irvine and Glasgow, moved to Germersheim, Germany in 1977, worked for US Army until 1993, spent the next 30 years as a freelance translator until his retirement in 2023.
Nonsense Poems, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a Radio Programme for Children: An Interview with Stewart Whyte on the vagaries, vicissitudes, coincidences and chance encounters that have influenced, enhanced and graced his life.
After completing her degree at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Edinburgh and London, Anette Degott wrote a PhD thesis on Norman MacCaig’s poetry. Her thesis, “Norman MacCaigs lyrisches Werk,” was published by Peter-Lang in Frankfurt in 1994. As a postgraduate student, she taught English at the Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz) and Friedrich Schiller University (Jena). As a fully qualified teacher of English and German she worked at the Stefan-George-Gymnasium in Bingen. Then she began instructing future secondary school teachers at the Studienseminar in Bad Kreuznach until her retirement. + 50+ Dozentin für englische, amerikanische und deutsche Literatur am ZWW.
The talk is about Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) whim I had the pleasure of meeting, interviewing and befriending over the years while I was writing my disseration – a monography of his work, consisting of more than 600 poems. This eminent 20th century Scottish poet, recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and canonised in school books across Great Britain is still hardly known internationally. The talk will focus on Norman MacCaig’s life and work, providing an outline of the three phases of his work, exemplified by his own reading of some poems. Hoewever, I will begin by explaining how it all began – how I met the poet and his work in 1986.
In this lecture, Margaret Bennet talks about the relevance of celebrating St. Andrew’s Day today and dives into the origins of this national holiday.
Originally from the isle of Skye, Margaret Bennett grew up in a family of tradition bearers, Gaelic on her mother’s side, and Lowland Scots on her father’s. She has a post-graduate degree in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland, a PhD in Ethnology from the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Doctorates (Music) from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews. From 1983 to ’96 she lectures at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, and since then has been a part-time lecturer (now Professor) at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. She teaches Folklore across the departments of Music and Drama, Film-making, Musical Theatre, Dance, Costume, set-design and theatre carprenty. She is also Honorary Teaching Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, and Honorary Professor of Antiquities at the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh). Singer, storyteller, broadcaster and writer, Margaret is the recipient of several awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Describes as ‘wearing her scholarship lightly’, in 2019 she was one of ten women in Scotland to receive the Saltire Society’s Outstanding Women Award for her ‘contribution to Scottish society’.
Sarah Neely is a writer, producer, and professor in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Glasgow. Much of her research has focused on the Orcadian film-maker and poet, Margaret Tait. In addition to writing a book-length study on Tait’s films (Peter Lang, 2016), she served as editor for Tait’s collection of poetry and writings (published by Carcanet in 2012 and reprinted as a ‘Carcanet Classic’ in 2024), as well as an experimental non-fiction work of Tait’s entitled Personae (published by LUX in 2021). She was director of Margaret Tait 100, a year-long programme of events celebrating the centenary of Tait’s birth in 2018. She was also co-producer for Luke Fowler’s feature-length film, Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait (2023), a film which premiered at Berlinale in February 2023 and went on to win awards at several festivals, including Cinema du Reel (Best International Film) and HotDocs (Best Medium-Length Documentary).
This talk on the work of the filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait, will focus in particular on her own translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (1940/1955). Lorca’s text and Tait’s unpublished translation, inspired the filmmaker to make a series of 29 watercolours which were exhibited at Tait’s studio on Rose Street as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1964. Tait would also later reference Lorca (and her translation) in her films Colour Poems (1974) and Tailpiece (1976). Although Tait’s translation was never published, this talk will present the material alongside a collection of some of the watercolours recently discovered which are currently being prepared for a new publication.
Silke Stroh is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Koblenz (Germany). She has published widely on various aspects of Scottish literature in English, Scots and Gaelic, from the medieval to the contemporary period, specialising in national and ethnic identity, colonialism and postcolonialism, migration and diaspora. Her earlier publications include the monographs 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 the co-edited essay collections 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). Her latest publication is a monograph that is due to appear later in 2025, which is entitled Narratives of Transmigration: Multiple Movement and Cultures of Memory in the British Colonial Diaspora and mainly deals with 19th-century Scottish emigrants and their descendants in Canada and New Zealand. In addition, she is currently working on new projects about Black and Asian Scottish literature, and on 18th-century Gaelic poetry.
The mid-18th-century song “The Garb of Old Gaul” is a well-known example of the increasing romanticisation of Highland soldiers as brave and brawny ‘noble savages’ who could make valuable contributions to the British army and imperial expansion. It is commonly assumed to have been composed in English by military officer Harry Erskine during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) with a very anglophone perspective on the Gaelic world. What is much less well-known is that the song’s lyrics come in various different versions, both in English and in Gaelic translation, that reflect a more complex process of intercultural negotiation about the ways in which Highlanders ought to be seen. Based on a current editorial project, this lecture traces this song’s textual history, argues that the English text might be older than is commonly assumed, sheds new light on the Gaelic translations, and analyses the implications of the different variants and their reception in terms of ethnic relations, social and spatial mobility, competing aesthetics, imperial ideologies and historical change.
Education for global citizenship involves awareness-raising, and knowledge and activities which aim to equip all participants with the skills and understandig to take responsibility, to value diversity and to play an active part in European democratic life today. To this end, the JGU Scotland HUB is organising a Global Outreach – Global Citizenship Project called “2025 GO Wasser”. This year’s project focusses on water as a resource that sustains life, supports eco systems and drives the economy. However, climate change is negatively impacting the quality and availability of water, with severe consequences for global communities. Against this backdrop, we aim to investigate how such impacts affect our ecosystems and human health.
Natasha Anderson earned both her doctoral degree in British Studies and her M.A. in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where she currently studies Digital Humanities. Her dissertation The Reader, the Body, and the Book: Visceral Reading Experiences in the Victorian Novel (“summa cum laude”) was part of a DFG-funded project. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the 2025 Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Award – Faculty 05: Philosophy and Philology and will be published with J.B. Metzler. She participated in the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and published articles in English Studies and Journal of European Periodical Studies as well as a chapter in the volume Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture. Her most recent publication is the article “Death, Deceit, and Detective Work in Dark Academia”, which she co-authored with Katja Anderson from the University of Maryland Global Campus, USA, in the 02/2024 issue of Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht.
Intellectuals, investigations, and insidious incidents together form the heart of dark academia. This term describes both a literary subgenre and an online phenomenon highlighting eerie aspects of erudition, which has gained widespread attention in the 21st century. Yet the roots of dark academia reach back even further as exemplified in 19th-century Scottish literature. Edinburgh’s brooding Gothic atmosphere, sinister spires, and narrow alleys enclosed by darkened sandstone embody for many digital content creators the essence of dark academia. This presentation explores books by three Scottish authors to illuminate how themes of dark academia address questions of identity, independence, and ethics. Based on historical events in the Scottish capital, Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story The Body Snatcher (1884) addresses the moral implications of human dissection in Victorian medial studies. Set in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1960) describes a charismatic teacher’s lasting impact on her six loyal students, ending in a stunning betrayal. Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001) traces the disappearance of a young university student in ‘the Athens of the North’, as installment 12 of the ongoing tartan noir series Inspector Rebus, named after the police officer whose murder investigations began in 1987, with the most recent book Midnight and Blue published in 2024.
These three literary works, whose authors studied at the University of Edinburgh, employ their character’s exploits as a lens to magnify an exploration of Scottish society with a focus on Edinburgh’s atmosphetic location, a capital concealing crimes and city streets filled with suspicion.
Zoë Strachan is the author of four novels, most recently Catch the Moments as They Fly, which was long listed for the Saltire Book of the Year Award 2024. Of her previous books, Ever Fallen in Love was shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards and the Green Carnation Prize and nominated for the London Book Awards. Her debut, Negative Space, won a Betty Trash Award and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. She also writes short stories, often for radio, and some creative non-fiction, plays and libretti for opera. She has edited six anthologies of new writing and has been a judge for the Dublin International Library Award (2020) and the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award (2021-2024). Her long-standing sound art/experimental radio collaboration with composer Nichola Scrutton allows her to blend composed and found text into poetic forms through live collaborative performance. Amongst other fellowships, Zoë has been UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence at the National Museum of Scotland, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow and visiting faculty at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa and Dartmouth College. She is Professor of Creative and Interdisciplinary Practice at the University of Glasgow. Louise Welsh is the author of ten novels including The Cutting Room, The Plague Times Trilogy and To the Dogs.
In this talk Zoe Strachan and Louise Welsh moderate each other on their most recent novels, which are very different genres (crime and historical) but linked by Scottishness and themes of family.
Louise has a ten-year practice in opera with composer Stuart MacRae. She is co-director (with Jude Barber) of the Empire Café, an award winning collective exploring Scotland’s relationship with empire. Louise & Jude are currently co-creating the podcast, Who Owns the Clyde? Louise is Professor of Creative Writing at University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Glasgow with her partner
Zoë Strachan.
In 1853, Catriona Dougall, along with her husband and young son, is forced to leave Knoydart as part of the Scottish Clearances. Seeking a better life, they settle in the rapidly growing metropolis of Glasgow. What they don’t realize is that this marks the beginning of a long struggle with poverty and trauma—its consequences echoing through seven generations, right up to the present day.
The Dougall family’s story is one of hope, resilience, and the enduring weight of ancestral mistakes—each biography deeply entwined with the history of Glasgow itself.”
Annika Sinner, born in 1995 in Heppenheim, Germany, is a journalist and writer. She first travelled to Glasgow in 2014 and later studied Political Communication at the University of Glasgow. Although she returned to Mainz in 2019, she maintains close ties to the city through friends and her Scottish partner.
Annika Sinner, born in 1995 in Heppenheim, Germany, is a journalist and writer. She first travelled to Glasgow in 2014 and later studied Political Communication at the University of Glasgow. Although she returned to Mainz in 2019, she maintains close ties to the city through friends and her Scottish partner. The Tree That Never Grew was inspired by her research into Glasgow’s history and personal accounts from her partner’s family.
Since the in inception of Scottish Studies in the early twentieth century, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism throughout Europe has called the cultural model of the nation-state into question and has increasingly led to a more sceptical approach to the persistence of cultural nationalist readings of Scottish literature and culture in the twenty-first century. In my talk, I want to reflect on what a future-oriented Scottish Studies might look like and highlight the need for new methods that move beyond the historicist and nationalist framework that has long dominated Scottish literary studies. Finding inspiration in literary works across history (from Robert Louis Stevenson and Nan Shepherd to Alasdair Gray and Sarah Moss), I want to suggest an environmental reading practice that thinks through rather than from or about Scotland.
Rather than treating the particular situation of Scotland as predicament or failure, I will be treating it as a special affordance for fostering post-national(ist) understandings of literature and literary studies. Paying attention to literary form and establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between Scottish literature and current theoretical debates, this reading practice emphasises the potential interventions and Scottish literature has to offer beyond the discipline of Scottish Studies. Contrary to its criticism and in line with current world literature approaches, Scottish literature has long been producing conceptual worlds beyond national and historical meaning-making and can help us rethink the categories we use to border not just our world but also our disciplines. Julia Ditter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. Her recent monograph Scottish Literature, Border and the Environment published by Bloomsbury considers how Scottish writers from the nineteenth-century to the present have mobilised literary form to articulate the relationship between bordering processes and environmental discourses. She has published articles on Scottish literature from the perspective of the environmental humanities and animal studies in Scottish Literary Review, The Bottle Imp and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Her current project looks at the representation of energy infrastructures in the nineteenth-century periodical press.
This presentation will focus on Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road and the ways in which it engages with questions of multiracial/multicultural narratives of Scottishness. I will be interested in the various narrative strategies underlying Kay’s memoir and how they often subvert and question the very genre in which they are produced. By weaving together aspects of gender/sexuality, ethnic and national identities Kay’s work renders recognizable their fictionality and by doing so questions any concept of stable and fixed identity.
Dr Angelica Michelis is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University teaching Victorian and fin-de-siecle literature, poetry, Victorian and contemporary crime fiction and the representation of food and eating in literature from the 19th century to the present. She is member of the ‘Long Nineteenth-century research Group’ at Manchester Metropolitan University and contributes to teacher training sessions in 19thc literature for the Prince’s Trust UK.
Paul Malgrati is a Franco-Scottish Lecturer of Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He is the author of two books: a scholarly monograph, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics. The Bard of Contention (1914-2014) (EUP, 2023), and a book of verse in Scots, Poèmes Ecossais (Blue Diode, 2022).
Robert Burns is Scotland’s best known and most influential poet, yet his political legacy remains deeply contested. His ambiguous verse—moving between patriotic odes, egalitarian lines, and royalist songs—has allowed Burns to be claimed by voices across the political spectrum. In this talk, I explore the transformations of Burns’s image throughout the late modern era, as revolutionaries, nationalists, and avant-garde writers co-opted his myth to challenge Scotland’s social and constitutional order. From Great War unionism to 1940s social-democracy and contemporary nationalism, Burns’s ‘afterlives’ illuminate the complexities of Scottish cultural politics. Blending political history with literary studies, I examine how the poet’s legacy continues to resonate in debates surrounding Scottish independence on the present day.
Rachael Sumner studied literature at the universities of Essex and York. In 2003 she moved to Poland, where she worked in higher education for fourteen years, completing her doctorate at the University of Opole. She now lectures in English language studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Rachael has written on postcolonial literature, the application of postcolonial theory to Irish literature, and also on the role of myth and memory in contemporary British fiction.
Ali Smith has received the acclamation of critics, academics and readers alike as one of the most celebrated authors working in the UK and Ireland. Her writing blends a keen curiosity for the social, cultural and political forces which shape our world with deep compassion and sharp, Dickensian style irony. Born in Scotland in 1962, she is generally regarded as an author whose work transcends national boundaries, focussing instead on lines of convergence between characters from different cultural and – frequently – historical backgrounds. In her novella Girl meets Boy (2007), however, she foregrounds her hometown of Inverness, imbuing it with narratives from in and beyond Scotland to become a site of transition and transformation. This presentation will interrogate the significance of Scotland to Smith’s writing, and the extent to which we can view her as a uniquely Scottish writer, with reference to Girl meets Boy as a point of departure for our discussion.
PD Dr. Gero Guttzeit is Assistant Professor of English Literature (Akademischer Rat a. Z.) at the Department of English and American Studies at LMU Munich. He has held visiting professorships at Freiburg and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and he currently teaches as Interim Full Professor of English at the University of Tübingen. His work is situated at the intersection of Modern British and American literary studies and guided by theoretical interests in authorship, concepts of character, and rhetoric. His first book on The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric (DeGruyter 2017) investigated Scottish-American connections in rhetoric. His second book manuscript on In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility is under contract with Palgrave. His interest in Stevenson stems from his time as a Master’s student in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh.
This paper explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic doppelganger in Jekyll and Hyde within the evolution of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish and transatlantic Gothic traditions. It examines how Stevenson’s version of Scottish Gothic is haunted by the political past and to what extent it can envision an imagined community for the future which is different to the one that produces the haunting multiplication of selves in the present. Unlike the dark, fractured doppelganger in “Jekyll and Hyde,” Stevenson’s reflections on authorship invoke the Brownies—a humorous and invisible version of the Gothic double—to illuminate the multiplication of selves in his writing process. By comparing these contrasting versions of the doppelganger, I aim to delineate the recurring motif of the double in Stevenson’s oeuvre as its significance varies across Gothic genre and Scottish national identity.
Merryn Glover is the award-winning author of fiction, drama, poetry and journalism. In a life spent crossing cultures, she was brought up in South Asia, went to University in Australia and has called Scotland home for nearly 30 years. Her plays and short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland and widely anthologised. Her first novel, A House Called Askival is set in an Indian hill-station, where she went to school, and her second, Of Stone and Sky, in the Badenoch region of the Cairngorms National Park where she now lives. It won Book of the Year at the Bookmark Book Festival, Blairgowrie, and was long-listed for the Highland Book Prize. In 2019, Merryn was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is a regular contributor to the Guardian Country Diary. Her newest book is The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd, short-listed for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and The Great Outdoors Book of the Year.
How do you tell the stories of a landscape and its people? How far back in time do you go? How do you find, choose and shape the stories that belong in your story? How is it different in fiction and non-fiction? Can they both be equally true? In this illustrated talk, Merryn will share about the writing of her two Cairngorms-set books, the novel Of Stone and Sky and the nature-writing/homage/memoir The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd.
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. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2024 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. And in 2024 she is visiting Fellow to the ScotHUB at JGU in Mainz.
This presentation is about one particular aspect of the work of Robert Burns, probably the best known of all Scottish writers. I will talk about the importance of Burns’s songs to Scottish culture as well as to my own work and within the wider work of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Across the years we’ve undertaken some wonderful performance-based projects on Burns’s songs and I will be sharing some of these sound worlds as part of the talk.
Johnny Mains is an award-winning editor renowned for finding ‘lost’ stories in the archives. His work with the British Library have produced the cornerstone anthologies Celtic Weird (2022), and Scotland the Strange (2023). He also write liner notes for the BFI and Arrow Video. His latest books are Bound in Blood (Titan Books, 2024) and Halloweird (British Library, 2024). He lives in the South West of England with his wife, child and dog
Johnny will be talking about Halloweird, reading a story from it and talking about rooting around in the archives and what it’s like to uncover lost treasures.
Education for global citizenship involves awareness-raising, and knowledge and activities which aim to equip all participants with the skills and understanding to take responsibility, to value diversity and to play an active part in European democratic life today. To this end, the Scotland HUB at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (JGU) is organising a Global Outreach – Global Citizenship Project called “2024 GO Mensch”.
The term Anthropocene coined in Mainz by Prof. Paul Crutzen in order to describe the influence of the Mensch (human being) on our planet or “the human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on earth.” Human activities have increasingly become the driving force behind environmental changes, causing irreparable damage to our planet. Understanding the Anthropocene is therefore essential for understanding the present climate crisis. Focusing on the Anthropocene also helps us to examine our own carbon footprint as a human being and to consider our own actions and responsibilities. “GO Mensch” addresses environmental issues in a multidisciplinary way, explores our imapct on the environment and discusses ways to minimise our carbon footprint. By embracing this epoch, we recognise our collective power to shape a resilient and thriving future for our planet. In this session of Reading Scotland, you will be able to see some of the results from the participants’ project work.
Since the 2010s, climate fiction (cli-fi) as genre has seen a stark increase on bookshelves in stores worldwide, balancing topics of science fiction and anthropogenic utopian and dystopian visions. In her novel Once There Were Wolves (2010), Charlotte McConaghy blurs the lines between surrealism and climate activism against the backdrop of the Scottish Cairngorms. Centred around the rewilding of wolves in the Scottish Highlands, the novel negotiates the importance of empathy with nature and animals through the employment of surrealist narrative elements and challenges (wo)men’s place in the ecosystem. In her talk Leonie Jungen will discuss visions of the post-Anthropocene, gender violence, and climate activism in contemporary fiction.
Leonie Jungen is currently a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. She studied Communication Sciences and English and Scottish Literature and Culture at the University of Mainz and the University of Edinburgh. In her PhD thesis, she focusses on female identity and transgenerational storytelling in Scottish national tales. Her recent publications include the editing of the 2022 conference proceedings for the German Association for the Study of English. Recently, she was awarded a three-year PhD scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. She is PG and ECR representative for the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literature and is also a member of the Scientists for Future regional group in Mainz/Wiesbaden.
In this talk James Robertson will look at the geographical, historical, and cultural background to five of his novels. He will discuss the significance of Scotland’s landscape for himself as a writer, as well as for the fictional characters in his work. Distinguishing between actual locations and imagined ones, he will explain why he sometimes chooses to invent places rather than set a fictional story in a real place. He will talk about historical and contemporary Scotland, and also about the relationship between urban and rural places and how that is represented in his fiction. In addition, he will illustrate some of this with readings from his work.
James Robertson is a poet, editor, and publisher, but is mainly known for his fiction. He has published seven novels to date. They are The Fanatic (2000), Joseph Knight (2003, Scottish Book of the Year in 2004), The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize), And the Land Lay Still (2010, Scottish Book of the Year), The Professor of Truth (2013), To Be Continued (2016), and News of the Dead (2021, winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2022). He grew up near Stirling, midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, has lived and worked in both of those cities as well as elsewhere, and now lives in a village in Angus, ten miles north of the city of Dundee.
By collecting a series of prizes and awards earlier this year, including four Oscars, Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things has arguably become the highest-profile adaptation of a Scottish novel since Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in 1996. In contrast to this earlier example, though, the Scottish character of the film is negligible (apart from Willem Dafoe’s fake Scottish accent, allegedly based on Gray’s own), and Alasdair Gray’s name and novel were decidedly marginal in most reviews and discussions of the film. This talk will briefly discuss the film version before proceeding to a re-evaluation of the 1992 novel and its varied literary, local/national (i.e. Glasgow/Scotland) and political dimensions. It may also touch on Gray’s works and reputation more generally, and on his love of adapting his own work, including a film script he wrote for Poor Things in 1993, which is rather different from the 2023 version.
Dietmar Böhnke is Senior Lecturer in British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig, as well as Study Abroad coordinator at the English Department. His research interests include Scottish literature and culture, especially of the present; the Victorian Age and its contemporary rewritings; book history (esp. Tauchnitz); and the British media, especially film. He has published various articles on these topics, as well as two books on contemporary Scottish authors: James Kelman (1999) and Alasdair Gray (2004). Most recently, he co-authored a book on the nineteenth-century publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz (2017). He also occasionally works as a presenter/interpreter of readings by high-profile contemporary writers (e.g. John Burnside, John M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, Howard Jacobson, Rachel Kushner, Deborah Levy, Tim Parks). In 2005, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
With increased efforts to revitalise Gaelic in Scotland, it has also been promoted in areas where specialised registers and terminologies are required. Various parties have been involved in developing vocabulary for these purposes, and the issue of corpus planning and developing new registers has been covered in the literature to some extent. At the same time, corpus planning for technical text production does not seem to be a priority in the language policy for Gaelic. This talk outlines the main domains and subject areas in which technical or specialised texts are produced and their relevance for the language. It also examines how technical text production has been discussed in academic literature and the role it has played in official language planning so far, discussing some of the problems faced in this respect.
Lena Korchmann studied translation at Leipzig University and took an interest in Scottish Gaelic while spending a semester in Edinburgh in 2016. She has since become a fluent speaker and is passionate about the language and its culture. Connecting her interest in Gaelic and language planning back to her translation studies, she wrote her M.A. on Gaelic political terminology used by the Scottish Parliament. She is now a PhD student at Leipzig University and a freelance translator. She also teaches Gaelic at the university’s language institute.
Billy Kay will explore a lifetime of working in the field of promoting Scottish culture, both at home and abroad through his work in radio and television. He will discuss the trials and tribulations of being a prominent advocate for his native language, Scots, and the language’s importance in his own sense of identity. Having met and often interviewed many of the great figures in 20th century Scottish culture, he will share some of his recollections of poets and writers like Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, William McIlvanney, Iain Crichton Smith, Janice Galloway, Hamisch Henderson etc. He will also tell stories collected around the world for his programmes and books on the Scottish diaspora, and do one or two readings from Born in Kyle, to give the audience the opportunity to hear contemporary Scots.
Writer and broadcaster Billy Kay was born in Galston, Ayrshire in 1951, and educated at Galston High School, Kilmarnock Academy and Edinburgh University. He produced and presented documentaries on Scottish cultural history for BBC Radio Scotland, winning five international awards for series like The Complete Caledonian Imbiber. He is co-author, with Cailean Maclean of the book Knee Deep in Claret. He is a passionate advocate of the Scots language and author of the classic work Scots: The Mither Tongue. His book on the phenomenal global influence of the Scottish diaspora The Scottish World was published in 2006. In November 2023 he published his memoir in Scots, Born in Kyle, which he describes as a love letter to an Ayrshire childhood. In addition to his native languages, Scots and English, Billy speaks French, German, and Portuguese. He is married to Maria João de Almeida da Cruz Diniz and they have three children and four grandchildren.
Scotland is famous for the beauty of its landscape and the tranquillity of its hills but beneath these apparently natural scenes is a history riven by conflict and oppression. What appears green and idyllic is in reality a battlefield that bears the scars of conflict. This seminar will explore how historic patterns of land ownership and changes in land use have profoundly affected the Highlands of Scotland we see today. It will also explore the current struggles over the future of Scotland’s land and consider what changes could bring about a rich natural heritage. The battles taking place for Scotland’s future are taking place in the minds of its people. The challenge for writers and artists is to capture the imagination of the Scottish people and take them on a journey that will show them what our future could be.
Growing up amongst the shipyards of Birkenhead, John’s passion for the outdoors was ignited by a school trip to the Lake District where he discovered a world of freedom in the hills. Mountains became a lifelong interest and took him to places like the Rockies and Mount Kenya.
John’s first book, shortlisted for The Great Outdoors magazine’s book of the year, The Last Hillwalker, is a classic in its genre. His second book, about his love of simple shelters, Bothy Tales, remains a best seller. John’s ability to take the reader with him on his adventures makes him stand out as an author. His novel, Sky Dance, takes the reader into the remote Scottish hills and shows them how traditional hunting practices have damaged the landscape. Through the eyes of two hill walkers, he explores the need for rewilding and captures a passion for wild places.
John continues to travel his beloved and hills and performs and writes about his passion for them as he invites others to explore the magic of wild Scotland.
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