According to Mark Twain, writing in 1883, most of the world had by then outlived the “harms” associated with Walter Scott’s “Middle-Age sham civilization.” But in “our south,” he continued, “they flourish pretty forcefully still.” Twain was referring to the US south, and at the Thirteenth International Walter Scott Conference, to be held in person at the University of South Carolina, in May 2024, Scott’s impact and influence on the US, both south and north, will be a major point of focus. But we invite conference participants also to think more broadly about the categories of north and south as they apply to, intersect with, and inform Scott’s life, work, reputation, and reinterpretation, including the norths and souths of Scotland, the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa, the Americas, and the global north and south more generally.

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Keynote Speakers

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Yoon Sun Lee is  Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature and Professor of English at Wellesley College, and author of, among many excellent publications, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (2004), and, most recently, The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (2022).   Matthew Dziennik is Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America, which won the First Book Award from the International Centre for Scottish studies. He is currently writing the first global history of recruitment in the British Empire.

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Location

The University of South Carolina, situated in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, is home to one of the finest collections of Scottish literary materials anywhere in the world, at the center of which is the G. Ross Roy Collection of Burnsiana and Scottish Literature.

The Thirteenth International Scott Conference will feature an exhibit with highlights from the library collections, and conference participants are encouraged to explore materials from this rich archive of books, manuscripts, and artifacts.

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Contributing Papers

Please send 300-400-word proposals for individual papers to Tony Jarrells (jarrells@mailbox.sc.edu) by January 15^th, 2024. For full panels or roundtable sessions, please send a 250-word description of the panel / roundtable topic and a couple of sentences on each of the contributing papers.