Events

Past Events

Spring Lecture 2025

Katherine Halsey (Professor of English Studies, University of Stirling) and Matthew Sangster (Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History, University of Glasgow): ‘Towards a True History of Reading Lives: Borrowing in Scotland, 1747-1837’

Friday 21 March 2025

Chair: Professor Penny Fielding

Abstract: ‘Histories of reading have often relied by necessity on anecdotal accounts by relatively elite readers. However, the affordances of digital technologies allow us to interpret previously intractable institutional manuscripts to provide a far richer evidentiary basis. Structuring their lecture around two key reading concepts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘instruction’ and ‘amusement’, Professors Halsey and Sangster will explore how readers in Scotland engaged with library books as pupils, students, professionals, members of communities and leisure readers. They will demonstrate how library borrowing records reveal rich, complex, idiosyncratic readers, liberated rather than bound by the libraries with which they interacted, ranging far beyond the ostensible purposes of their institutions in their diverse engagements with print.’

Spring Workshop 2025

Prof. Katherine Halsey (Stirling) and Prof. Matthew Sangster (Glasgow): ‘Edinburgh University Library’s Borrowing Registers’

Friday 21 March 2025

Description: ‘This workshop will introduce participants to the borrowing registers of Edinburgh University Library, one of the largest surviving collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century borrowing records in Scotland. It will explore the borrowings of the students, professors and townspeople who used the library for a wide range of intellectual (and less intellectual) purposes.

During the workshop, attendees will examine the content and material form of the registers, discussing the ways in which ideological assumptions are encoded in the institutional practices represented. They will also trace some of the rich reading lives revealed in the registers’ pages.’

Autumn Lecture 2024

Dirk Van Hulle (Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford): ‘Writers’ Libraries’

Friday 8 November 2024

Chair: Dr Hannah Simpson

Every writer is also a reader. A work of literature often starts in the margins of another book. Knowing what and how a writer read can help us understand the origins of their work. This lecture considered modernist authors as readers and examined how they read, how their reading translated into their own writings, and how we can map this process in a digital edition.

Prof. Van Hulle also gave a workshop at the Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library, earlier in the day:

Autumn Workshop 2024

Prof. Dirk Van Hulle: ‘The Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’ 

8 November 2024

A workshop exploring the work of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project directed by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon.

Spring Lecture 2024

Emma Smith (Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, University of Oxford): ‘Following the Money: Book Collecting in the Age of Slavery’ 

Friday 16 February 2024

Chair: Professor James Loxley

For the inaugural EDITION event, we welcomed Professor Emma Smith to Edinburgh from the University of Oxford to give our 2024 Spring Lecture. Emma is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. In April 2023, she published an opinion piece in The Guardian noting that ‘as we reckon with the UK’s colonial past, we need to examine the history behind valuable books – even our beloved Shakespeare’. Emma’s lecture for Edition developed her ongoing work on connections between rare books and wealth derived from the slave trade.

Spring Workshop 2024

Prof. Emma Smith: ‘Shakespeare, Mount Stuart and Book Collecting in the Nineteenth Century’ 

Friday 16 February 2024

The Scottish Novel in 1824

1 July 2024

This one-day symposium marked the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet. More generally, this was a moment of ascendancy for ‘Scotch novels’, with the instability wrought by the financial crash of 1825/6 yet to materialise, and with the Edinburgh milieu at the heart of anglophone literary culture.

This event featured a keynote lecture from Professor Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley), and was hosted by Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) at the University of Edinburgh. It was supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities.

As part of this event, EDITION organized a ‘show and tell’ workshop, featuring rare books and other materials from Edinburgh University Library's Heritage Collections and from Selkirk Museums. 

For more information see The Scottish Novel in 1824 – A Symposium.