Our final event took place in January 2023. You can watch recordings from all of our events on
our YouTube channel, and you can find further information about each of our events below.
10 August 2021: Seminar 1. ‘What is Revival?’
In this event, our panelists discussed what revival means generally in cultural terms and specifically in a Scottish context. Our panelists proposed definitions, examined the importance of manifestos, and analysed the cultural, historical and social ‘causes’ of revival.
Alex Thomson – intellectual contexts of revival/renaissance
Corey Gibson – folk revival and its relation to renaissance
Charlotte Lauder – magazines promoting revival/renaissance
Michelle Foot – spiritualism in Celtic Revival art
Our panelists all recorded talks before the seminar. You can see the talks here, along with a recording of the seminar itself (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
5 November 2021: Seminar 2. ‘From Revival to Renaissance’
In this event, our panelists mapped the links between the late-Victorian period of the Celtic Revival and the Modernism (or otherwise) of the subsequent Scottish Renaissance period.
Juliet Shields – uncanonical Scottish female writers and revival
Glenda Norquay – Robert Louis Stevenson and revival; RLS in the renaissance
Andrew Nash – publishing revival and renaissance
Arianna Introna – from Victorian imperial fiction to the imperial connections of Violet Jacob’s renaissance
Our panelists all recorded talks before the seminar. You can see the talks here, along with a recording of the seminar itself (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
31 March 2022: Seminar 3. ‘The Scottish Revival and the Canon’
Our third event addressed how the Scottish literary and critical canon has placed the Scottish Revival, the role (both positive and negative) played by the Scottish Revival in canon formation, and who might still be absent from that canon, especially women writers and Gaelic writers.
David Goldie – popular fiction/culture and its place in/out of revival/renaissance
Petra Poncarová – Gaelic revival, its contexts and connections
Scott Lyall – how contemporary Scottish criticism reads revival/renaissance
Helena Duncan – Scottish female renaissance writers and (semi)rural community as problematising revival
Our panelists all recorded talks before the seminar. You can see the talks here, along with a recording of the seminar itself (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
8 June 2022: Public Event 1. ‘Patrick Geddes and Revival’
On 8 June 2022, in association with The Patrick Geddes Centre, we hosted an online public event on ‘Patrick Geddes and Revival’.
Professor Murdo Macdonald – Geddes and Renascence
Dr Elsa Richardson – Occultism and Folklore in the Fin de Siècle
Dr Michael Shaw – Geddes, Revival and Youth (Dr Michael Shaw)
All of our panelists gave their talks live during the event. You can watch the entire event, or any individual talk, here (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
31 August 2022: Special Event. ‘MacDiarmid at 100’
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of MacDiarmid’s first appearance in print the Scottish Revival Network organised a one day conference featuring papers relating to MacDiarmid and his work. The conference took place across two sessions:
Session 1: ‘Readings and Revisions’
Chaired by Jim Benstead (Edinburgh Napier University), and featuring papers by:
Patrick Crotty (University of Aberdeen) – ‘Chitterin’ lichts: Non-dictionary Textual Sources in Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, with particular reference to “The Watergaw”’
Scott Lyall (Edinburgh Napier University) – ‘to “meddle wi’ the thistle”: The Scottish Chapbook, Modernism, and Renaissance’
Michael Whitworth (University of Oxford) – ‘MacDiarmid the Spaceman’
Alan Riach (University of Glasgow) – ‘The Ghost of John Nisbet: Hugh MacDiarmid’s first published work’
Sesion 2: ‘Concepts and Peripheries’
Chaired by Scott Lyall (Edinburgh Napier University), and featuring papers by:
Alexander Linklater (independent researcher) – ‘In Search of CMG: The Peculiar First Person in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry’
Fiona Paterson (University of Glasgow) – ‘Archipelagic Distinctions: Plurality, Particularity and Decentralisation in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Vision of World Language”’
Alex Thomson (University of Edinburgh) – ‘Provincializing MacDiarmid’
Jim Benstead (Edinburgh Napier University) – ‘“no farther from the ‘centre of things”: peripheral citation in In Memoriam James Joyce’
You can find more information about the event, including abstracts for our panelists’ papers, here. All of our panelists gave their talks live during the event. You can watch the entire event, or any individual talk, here (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
November–December 2022: Seminar 5. ‘Global Revival’
This event looked at the influences of the Scottish Revival on other cultures and revivals and explore the international influences on the Scottish Revival.
Richard Alan Barlow – Scotland in the Irish revival, and Ireland in the Scottish revival
Carla Sassi – European perspectives on revival and renaissance
Jim Benstead – ‘Hence this hapax legomenon’: Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘guerilla plagiarism’
All of our panelists gave their talks live during the event. You can watch the entire event, or any individual talk, here (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):
January 19th 2023: final online event. ‘The Revival and the National Movement’
Our final event examined the intersections between the Scottish Revival as a cultural movement and the national movement in politics.
Paul Malgrati – Iconoclasm & reformation: Robert Burns in the Scottish Renaissance movement
Frances Fowle – Myth-making and identity in Scottish revivalist art: John Duncan, Race & Nation
Alan Riach – The politics of excess
All of our panelists gave their talks live during the event. You can watch the entire event, or any individual talk, here (once a video is playing, use the forward and back buttons either side of the play/pause button to move between the talks):