Literature and Languages

Pathfoot B10

Department of English Studies

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA
Scotland

UK

B.A., Dip.Ed. (Stirling); Ph.D. (Stirling)

Since completing my Ph.D. at Stirling in 1998, I have worked on successive projects for the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, under the direction of Professor Douglas Mack.

I am currently AHRC Research Fellow (2005- 2008) on the ‘Songs of James Hogg’ Project, working in collaboration with Dr. Kirsteen McCue at Glasgow University, on two volumes of Hogg’s songs that will be published within the Collected Works series. I recently organised a very successful exhibition of James Hogg’s life and work at the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh from August 2005 until March 2006. Titled ‘The Whole Hogg’, it presented Hogg’s life and work through storyboards, artefacts, and books drawn from the extensive Hogg holdings at Stirling University Library and Bowhill House.

Recent conference papers include ‘Transatlantic Reflections: Hogg in America/America in Hogg’, at Crossing Borders: James Hogg and the Global Context of British Romanticism, the Twelfth James Hogg Society Conference, Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, Mississippi, April 2006; ‘The AHRC Songs Project’, presented to James Hogg and the Scottish Song Tradition a symposium (co-organised with Dr. Kirsteen McCue) MacRobert Arts Centre, University of Stirling, 19 May 2006, and ‘True Lies: Revisiting the Polemic Wars of 1678-80’, at Icons and Iconoclasts: The Long Seventeenth Century, University of Aberdeen, July 2006.

My research interests lie in Scottish literature ranging from mediaeval to modern, in particular, early nineteenth-century literature in its historical and cultural contexts, and demotic pre-Enlightenment literatures; James Hogg; John Galt; transatlantic studies; literary history; Scottish Covenanting literature, and the democratic impulse in Scottish fiction. I have taught undergraduate option modules on a diverse number of topics including, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, ‘Texts and Books’, ‘James Hogg’ and ‘The Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’.

Current work-in-progress includes various tasks on the ‘Songs of James Hogg’ project; completing a bibliography of Hogg’s publications in American periodical literature, 1809-c.1840s for on-line publication; writing a paper on Hogg and America for an edited volume; preparing a Source Book of Hogg and America; developing my thesis into a monograph of Scottish literary history in a religious and historical context; researching a book on Scottish covenanting in literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries; preparing articles on Patrick Walker; Donald Cargill; Cameronians.