The Dis/ability and Scottish Studies Working Group has formed to encourage critical engagement with narratives of illness and dis/ability in cross-period Scottish literature and culture. It aims to create a space for community building and support in which to explore the variety and richness of narratives of illness and dis/ability in Scottish literature. The webinar series ‘Narratives of Illness and Dis/ability in Scottish Literature’ is the initial project to emerge from the working group and will balance two fifteen-minute presentations with a lively discussion period. All webinars will be free and open not only to other academics, but also to interested members of the public.
Session I: Narratives of Illness and Dis/ability in Scottish Literature webinar series: Holly Faith Nelson & Graham Morgan
Date: 15 May 2026
Time: 8 pm UK time
Zoom link:
Holly Faith Nelson (Trinity Western University): ‘Writing the Gendered, Working-Class, Dis/abled Self: A Glaswegian Woman’s Fight for Justice in Victorian Scotland’
Abstract: This paper explores how one working-class, dis/abled Glaswegian woman fought back against the medical and religious establishment by making her life story public in Victorian Scotland, sharing the unimaginable life-long medical injuries she endured at the hands of an incompetent physician and demanding justice.
Bio: Holly Faith Nelson, Ph.D., is Professor of English, Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute, and Graduate Stream Coordinator (English) of the M.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. She is also the secretary of the James Hogg Society and editor of Studies in Hogg and his World. She has widely published on Scottish, Welsh, and English literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; her publications include a monograph (co-authored with Sharon Alker), Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722, and 11 co-edited volumes, notably James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (Ashgate) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture. She has taught dis/ability and literature at the graduate level and has written several articles and book chapters on the subject matter, most recently in relation to a novel by John Galt. She was born in Ayrshire in Scotland and grew up in Edinburgh before her family immigrated to the West Coast of Canada.
Graham Morgan: ‘How activism informs mental illness in memoir‘
Abstract: An account of life with schizophrenia since the Asylums of the eighties to compulsory treatment in the present day. How to incorporate that journey in creative non-fiction in an authentic un stereotyped way.
Bio: Graham Morgan lives in Argyll with his partner Wendy, her children, Dash the dog and the rabbits. He has a diagnosis of Schizophrenia and has been treated compulsorily for this over the last 16 years. He uses this experience in his work and activism to raise awareness and seek social justice for the community he sees himself as a part of. He incorporates this into his memoirs START and Blackbird Singing which he will talk about at this event. He was awarded an MBE for his work in the world of mental health in 2012.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF SCOTTISH LITERATURES 