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Division of Humanities colleagues have been busy over the past few months working on some fantastic projects. Allan Kennedy (History) with guidance from Chris Murray (English) has just finished a Scottish History comic, supported by strategic development funding and in partnership with History Scotland magazine. The comic is called ‘The Persecution of Jean Lands’, and Allan hopes it will be the first in a series of comics. The comic describes the real and sensational 17th-century criminal trial which saw Daniel Nicholson and Marion Maxwell tried for the crime of ‘notorious adultery’, a story replete with deception, violence, and sexual deviance. Visit the History Scotland website to find out more.
- The University hosted the Year of Gothic Women conference in August which was an interdisciplinary project devoted to spotlighting undervalued and understudied women writers. Daniel Cook has two related publications ‘Frankenstein, Continued’, in The Afterlives of Frankenstein, ed. Robert Lublin and Elizabeth Fay (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Routledge Companion to Gothic Women Writers, ed. D Cook, L. Kirkley and D. Russell. The conference programme is available by clicking on the image below.
Michael Morris (English) is editor of Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery which includes a chapter by Amy Parent and William Moore of Nisga’a Nation in Canada. Amy is Research Chair of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University. The chapter is on the context and rationale for the return of a memorial totem pole and was submitted as part of a portfolio of evidence to the National Museum of Scotland which agreed to ‘rematriate’ the pole. (Nisga’a Nation is matrilineal so is looking to use decolonial feminist language- rematriation rather than repatriation.) Michael was a special guest at the ceremony in Edinburgh which made headlines around the globe recently. See this article in The Guardian for more.
The Nisga’a delegation at the National Museum of Scotland. Photo Andrew Milligan / PA Creative Writing students will have an opportunity this semester to undertake a residency at the Arbroath Abbey as part of Hospitalfield House’s New Scriptorium project. Student responses to this residency will be published on the Hospitalfield website and in a public event held here at the university
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Tina Rock and Dominic Smith (Philosophy) have been busy forging ‘S-ai-REN’ (the Social AI Research and Education Network), with colleagues in Law, Politics, Biomedical Sciences, Computing, Art and Media, and Engineering. They have a website, a ‘SAIREN SOUNDINGS’ speakers series, and have published a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, on Reimagining AI.
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Throughout the summer Humanities lecturers have been busy teaching and lecturing. Ashley Woodward (Philosophy) taught a public course on a key text in philosophy of information technology and artificial intelligence, Raymond Ruyer’s Cybernetics and the Origin of Information. (His co-translation of this book is forthcoming in December). Frank Ruda’s public keynote lecture at the European Graduate School is now online.