Scottish Studies

Perhaps in inverse proportion to its size, the department has long been internationally recognised for its contributions to Scottish Studies, not least because of two landmark conferences on, respectively, Walter Scott (2003) and James Hogg (2010). Silvia Mergenthal has published extensively on these two and other canonical Scottish authors such as Robert Burns, but in addition to the study of Scottish literature, her work reflects a more broadly based cultural studies approach. Thus, for instance, in an article on the mnemonic topography of Edinburgh, she investigates the relationship between links between monuments dedicated to writers, canon formation, and cultural nationalism ("Edinburgh Monuments, the Literary Canon, and Cultural Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective", 2015).

Julia Ditter is teaching and researching Scottish literature from the nineteenth-century to the present. Her research has been published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Scottish Literary Review, The Bottle Imp and Tierstudien. She is currently preparing a monograph titled Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination for Bloomsbury.