SCOTLAND: 
NATIONAL IDENTITY & THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

Thanks to the kindness of innumerable people, our program of lectures & performances is nearly complete. We are pleased to include the following--

Sheila Douglas’ experience in traditional music and Scots language education spans four
decades and includes singing, song-writing, song-collecting, story-telling, editing, teaching, writing, and publishing. She is currently Course Director of the Scottish Certificate in Traditional Scots Song at the Music Centre, University of St. Andrews, where she oversees a team of instructors that includes some of Scotland’s finest singers -- both tradition-bearers and professional performers. She is also Scots language tutor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance. She holds a doctorate in folktale research and is a past chairman of the Traditional Music and Song Association. With her husband, Andrew Douglas, she co-founded The Merlin Press, which produces Scots language educational materials. Her books include (for adults) Sing a Song of Scotland, The King o' the Black Art (a traditional tale), The Sang's the Thing, Come Gie’s a Sang, and Fair Upon Tay, and (for children) The Magic Chanter, Mixter Maxter, and My Sledgin Granny. Sheila Douglas has also recorded an album of original songs, Lines Upon the Water (Ossian) and edited volume 7 of Mercat Press’ 1997 publication of The Greig-Duncan Song Collection. Dr. Douglas will lecture on Scottish traditional song, Scottish political song, and the 20th-century folk revival.

Robert Crawford's poetry, in both Scots and English, has been widely published and
anthologized. His books of verse include Spirit Machines, A Scottish Asembly, Masculinity, and Talkies. He is also an influential scholar, author of Devolving English Literature, The Scottish Invention of English Literature, and Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in 20th Century Poetry, and editor of Robert Burns and Cultural Authority. He is Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has recently edited (with Mick Imlah) The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Robert Crawford will talk about Scottish poetry and read from his own work. Some of his books are available in the U.S. 

Poet Kathleen Jamie is the author of The Way We Live, The Queen of Sheba, and The Autonomous Zone: Poems & Photographs from Tibet (with photographer Sean Mayne Smith). Her newest book, Jizzen (old Scots for childbed) includes a series of poems on pregnancy and childbirth. Her poems have been widely anthologized and reviewed, and she has also published a book about her travels in Baltistan, The Golden Peak. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews. Kathleen Jamie will read from her work and talk about Scottish poetry.

Poet W.N. Herbert’s books, in English and Scots, include Forked Tongue, The Laurelude,
Caberet McGonagell, The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick, Dundee Doldrums,
Anither Music, The Landfish, and (with Robert Crawford) Sharawaggi. His books have received the Scottish Arts Council Book Award (twice), the Poetry Book Society recommendation (twice), and the Northern Arts Book Award. He has also collaborated with film-makers, musicians, and sculptors. W.N. Herbert holds a doctorate in Modern Literature from Oxford, and his critical writings include To CircumjackMacDiarmid and essays on modern poetry. He edits Gairfish, a journal publishing work in Scots, Gaelic and English, and is a Writing Fellow at Lancaster University. W.N. Herbert will read from his work and talk about Scottish poetry. You can read an interview with W.N. Herbert at http:/www.poetrykit.org/iv00/iv.htm#herbert

T.M. Devine is University Research Professor and Director of the Institute of Irish and
Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research. A former Director of the Research Centre for Scottish History at Strathclyde University, he also holds Adjunct Chairs at the  Universities of North Carolina (US) and Guelph (Canada). He has published numerous books, including The Great Highland Famine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The social transformation of the Scottish Highlands, Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, and The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and Agrarian Development. He has also edited or co-edited several important collections, including Eighteenth Century Scotland: Explorations and Revisions, Scotland in the Twentieth Century, Glasgow: Beginnings to 1830, 
Improvement and Englightenment, and Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society. Several of his books, including his recently acclaimed The Scottish Nation: 1700-2000, are available in the U.S. T.M. Devine will lecture on Scottish history.

Academic and journalist Tom Nairn holds degrees in Art, Mental Philosophy and Philosophical Aesthetics. He has published widely on nationalism, internationalism, and leftist politics, and has taught at numerous institutions, including Birmingham University,
Hornsey College of Art, and the Prague College of the Central European University. From 1995 to 2000 he established a Nationalism Studies degree for the Graduate School of the University of Edinburgh, and in 2001 he will join the faculty of Monash University in Australia. He has also worked in television and been a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, where he researched and wrote on the future of NATO. His books include After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited, The Beginning of the End (with Angelo Quattrocchi), The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, Atlantic Europe, and The Left Against Europe. His newest, Counter-Clockwise: Renegotiating Britain, is forthcoming. Watch for his new Nationalism Studies site, which will appear shortly on: <www.tom-nairn.com.> Tom Nairn will lecture on Scottish devolution. Some of his books, including the most recent,
After Britain, are available in the U.S. An essay on neo-nationalism in Europe may be found at http://members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/NairnEssay.htm

Murray G.H. Pittockis Chair in Literature and Convenor of the Scots-Irish Research Network at Strathclyde University. His books include Celtic Identity and the British Image, Inventing and Resisting Britain, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans, The Invention of Scotland, and Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s. Dr. Pittock also edits Scottish Literary Journal, and is currently editing a new edition of the collected works of James Hogg. A frequent broadcaster and lecturer, his other interests include landscape and Scottish literature, detective fiction, James Macpherson, and Rob Roy. Dr. Pittock will lecture from his forthcoming book on Scottish identity. His books are available in the United States.

Ken Simpson is Director of the Centre for Scottish Cultural Studies at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. His publications include The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature, and Robert Burns, Aberdeen. He is also the editor of  Love and Liberty: Robert Burns-A Bicentenary Celebration, and Burns Now. He has written and lectured on poetic genre and national identity, and he is currently working on a study of poetry and nationalism in eighteenth-century Scotland. Ken Simpson will lecture on Scottish literature and identity. (Schedule yet to be confirmed)

And: 

A playwright, yet to be determined.

A Gaelic scholar, yet to be determined.