Upcoming Events:
EDITION Autumn Lecture 2024
Professor Dirk Van Hulle (Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford) – ‘Writers’ Libraries’
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 considers modernist authors as readers and examines how they read, how their reading translated into their own writings, and how we can map this process in a digital edition.
Fri, 8 November 2024 16:00 – 17:30 GMT, 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square. Chair: Dr Hannah Simpson
Followed by a drinks reception.
Past Events:
Annual Lecture 2024
Professor Emma Smith (University of Oxford) – ‘Following the Money: Book Collecting in the Age of Slavery’
Fri, 16 Feb 2024 16:00 – 17:30 GMT, 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square. 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 Annual 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.
A recording of the lecture is available to watch here:
The Scottish Novel in 1824
Mon, 1 July 2024 13:00 – 18:00 GMT, Centre for Research Collections and 1.06 Project Room, 50 George Square
This one-day symposium marks 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 features a keynote lecture from Professor Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley), and is hosted by Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) at the University of Edinburgh. It is supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities.
EDITION is involved with the workshop element of the day, taking place in the Centre for Research Collections.
For more information see this page.