CIVIS Webinar ‘Outreach of Scottish Literature’

Kirsten Stirling, Corey Gibson and Marie Hedon are inviting everybody interested to the CIVIS Scottish literature Spring Webinar on the “Outreach of Scottish Literature”, held on 12 March 2026 at 5-6pm GMT / 18-19h CET. The theme for this webinar is contemporary literature in translation.

Please register here, a zoom link will be sent before the event.

Speakers: 

John Corbett, Professor of English at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University (BNBU) : As Others See Us: Scottish Literature in and out of Translation

It is now recognized that the translation of poetry, fiction and drama into the literatures of Scotland has played a major formative role on the development of Scottish literature. It is increasingly obvious that the translation of Scottish literatures into other languages changes them in unexpected, contradictory, and telling ways. A comparative literary perspective on the literatures of Scotland changes how we read them, and how we study them. This talk will focus on a few examples of translations into and out of the literatures of Scotland to illustrate the impact of Scottish literature on the ecosystems of other cultures, and to show how entry into those ecosystems gives new insights into Scottish literary studies.

Paul Barnaby, Acquisition and Scottish Literary Collections Curator, University of Edinburgh : The Birth of BOSLIT: Setting up a Database of Scottish Literature in Translation

This talk will discuss the establishment and first phase of the BOSLIT (Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation) project, on which I worked as bibliographer/researcher from 1994 to 1999. It will address the following questions. Whose needs was the BOSLIT database intended to serve? How was it designed and made available? What cataloguing conventions did we employ? How did we compile a search-list of Scottish writers? How did we define ‘Scottishness’ and ‘literature’? How did we locate translations? What different strategies die we use to find monographs and individual pieces (poems, short stories, essays) published in periodicals or anthologies. How did we overcome language barriers? What kind of gaps were there in our coverage? How did the aims and strategies of the project change in light of often surprising research results? The talk will also briefly discuss the evolution of BOSLIT in the early years of the present century and the recent successful attempt to rescue and relaunch the database at Glasgow University.

If you missed the Autumn webinar and/or are interested in its topic, “Poetry and Public Life in Scotland”, the video is available here.