2024
Eleoma Bodammer (University of Edinburgh) was awarded the Jack Medal for the chapter ‘John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895): Translating Faust I in Scotland (1834),’ published in Deutsch-Britischer Kulturtransfer im Vormärz, ed. Andrew Cusack (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2024)
Statement: “I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded the 2024 Jack Medal for my chapter ‘John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895): Translating Faust I in Scotland (1834),’ which was published in the book Deutsch-britischer Kulturtransfer im Vormärz [German-British Cultural Transfer in the Vormärz], edited by Andrew Cusack (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2024). At a time when Modern Languages departments across the UK are under the considerable pressure of cuts and closures, it seems timely that the 2024 Jack Medal committee has chosen to recognise research that focuses on the historical importance of language learning abroad, the significance of the knowledge of literature, culture, and history for the development of language and translation skills, the value of literary translation, and Scotland’s strong cultural connections with Europe.
My chapter focuses partly on the ways in which the Scottish Professor John Stuart Blackie introduced German literature to British readers, and partly on one of his most important achievements, his metrical English translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust I (1808), published in 1834. Blackie held the Chair of Greek at the University of Edinburgh (1852-1882) but had a life-long passion for the German language and German literature that originated while pursuing his studies as a young man at the universities in Göttingen and Berlin in Germany (1829-1830). Alongside Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Blackie became a prolific cultural mediator of German literature in Scotland, and published essays, translations and book reviews in British periodicals that created a significant context for the emerging academic field of German Studies in Scotland in the nineteenth century. A central focus in my chapter is Blackie’s contribution to nineteenth-century translation theories and I concentrate on his use of metaphors in his translator’s preface to Faust I in order to explain his translation approach. I draw on Rainer Guldin’s classification system for translation metaphors in order to interpret Blackie’s ideas about translation.
I would like to thank the British Academy for supporting this research in the form of a Small Research Grant, shared with Professor Essaka Joshua (University of Notre Dame), and the AHRC for awarding me a Research Fellowship to work on my project ‘Scottish-German Cultural Exchange’.”
Gioia Angeletti (University of Parma) was awarded the Honourable Mention for the article ‘Scottish Literature of Migration and Transculturality: Subversive Reticence and Gender Negotiations in Lady Anne Barnard’s Cape Writings,’ published in La questione Romantica 15: 1/2 (December 2023).
Statement: ‘I am profoundly honoured and moved to receive an Honourable Mention in the Jack Medal for the 2024 award season for my article “Scottish Literature of Migration and Transculturality: Subversive Reticence and Gender Negotiations in Lady Anne Barnard’s Cape Writings”. This recognition is especially meaningful to me, not only as the culmination of years of dedicated research on Anne Barnard (née Lindsay, 1750–1825)—a fascinating yet often overlooked figure—but also as an impetus to further explore her work in the context of one of my central academic interests: the intricate negotiations, exchanges, and tensions that arise in cross-cultural encounters. So, I am sincerely grateful to the Award Committee for their support and encouragement, which reaffirm my commitment to the study of Scottish literature of migration and exile. This award also offers me the opportunity to acknowledge my profound debt to the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in Edinburgh, which, thanks to a fellowship in the summer of 2022, allowed me to immerse myself in the Barnard archives at the National Library, delving deeply into her life and writings. I fell in love with Scottish literature as a student at the University of Bologna in the late 1980s, before exploring it further during my Erasmus and PhD years in Glasgow in the 1990s, and since it was my beloved and greatly missed friend, Andrew Hook, who nurtured and sustained my enthusiasm for this field, it is to his memory that I dedicate this award, with gratitude and affection.’
2023
Jamie Reid Baxter (University of Glasgow) was awarded the 2023 Jack Medal for the article ‘Esther Inglis: A Franco-Scottish Jacobean Writer and her Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World,’ which was published in the journal Studies in Scottish Literature 48: 2 (2023).
Statement: I am genuinely moved by the award of the 2023 Jack Medal in recognition of my article ‘Esther Inglis: A Franco-Scottish Jacobean Writer and her Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World,’ published by Studies in Scottish Literature 48.2, for Ronnie Jack was a treasured friend and a tireless encourager and supporter of my work in exploring less familiar aspects of Scottish Renaissance writing. The 2023 Jack Medal means that I am now able to share with him, posthumously, my joy in the work of Esther Inglis, which I first encountered only in July 2018. Inglis was the daughter of two Huguenot refugees, Nicolas Langlois and Marie Presot, who made their home in Edinburgh from mid-1574 onwards. 2024 is the 450th anniversary of the opening of the ‘Franche scole’ that they operated in James VI’s capital. 2024 is also the 400th anniversary of their daughter Esther Inglis’ death in Edinburgh, which Ronnie Jack’s own Edinburgh University is marking in style. I owe a great debt to the scholars and librarians who shared their research and images of manuscripts with me. Hitherto, Inglis has been known for her calligraphic presentation manuscripts, gifted to recipients in Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and England. Ronnie Jack saw Scottish Literature as part of world literature in its own right, and it is profoundly fitting that this year, it is as a Franco-Scottish writer that Esther Inglis is the beneficiary of the IASSL Jack Medal. On her behalf, as it were, I thank the IASSL for acknowledging her life and work; I likewise thank Patrick Scott and his team at the journal Studies in Scottish Literature, and Dr Georgianna Ziegler, who co-edited the text of the fifty Octonaries with me, for the time and care they put into making sure that Esther the poet has now been brought before the world.
Suchitra Choudhury (University of Glasgow) was awarded an Honourable Mention for her chapter ‘Frederick Niven’s The Paisley Shawl (1931),’ which forms part of her monograph Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture (Ohio UP, 2023).
Statement: I am delighted to have received an Honorary Mention for my book chapter ‘Frederick Niven’s The Paisley Shawl (1931),’ which forms part of my monograph Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture (Ohio UP, 2023). As a twentieth-century diasporic novelist, Niven was fully aware of the Janus-faced character of Scotland, whose people identified as being both involuntary emigrants and aggressive colonizers. The award is an appropriate reminder and incentive to inspect more thoroughly, with cross-disciplinary approaches, the multivalent ways in which countries such as Canada and India feature in Scottish literature.
2022
Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow) and Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh (University of Edinburgh) were awarded the 2022 Jack Medal for their article ‘Co-ainm na taca seo an-uiridh: Dugald MacNicol’s Caribbean Lament for Argyll’ which was published in the journal Studies in Scottish Literature 47: 2 (2022). The Jack Medal was awarded in recognition of the extensive primary research and in appreciation of the article’s cross-cultural approach, which provides an original and important perspective on a complex and pivotal chapter in Scotland’s colonial history.
Statement: We are very proud to have been awarded the 2022 Jack Medal for our article ‘Co-ainm na taca seo an-uiridh: Dugald MacNicol’s Caribbean Lament for Argyll,’ Studies in Scottish Literature 47: 2 (2022). This is our first collaborative article on Gaelic literature and we hope that this award from the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literature will encourage further collaborative cross-disciplinary research of this kind, drawing on both Gaelic and Anglophone sources. It is a welcome acknowledgement and timely recognition of the central importance of Gaelic to Scottish literature more generally. The Jack Medal recognises research on Scottish literature’s international connections: the fact that MacNicol’s Gaelic texts were written in the colonial West Indies makes this a timely project, connecting with a wave of recent scholarship on romantic period literature and colonial enslavement. We’re especially grateful to scholarly contacts in Barbados who have helped us recover some of the details of MacNicol’s life in the Caribbean, as well as (nearer home) to a supportive community of historians interested in Scotland’s colonial past, Gaelic scholars, and experts in Highland history and culture. We’d also like to thank Patrick Scott, Tony Jarrells, and the team at the journal Studies in Scottish Literature for their encouragement and professionalism, it’s been a privilege to be published by such an outstanding international journal of Scottish literature.
Kirstie Blair (University of Stirling) was awarded an Honourable Mention for her article ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Scottish Working-Class Writer: John Parkainson/Yehya-En-Nasr and Islam in Ayrshire’ which was published in the journal Studies in Scottish Literature 48: 1 (2022). The article provides an original and theoretically sophisticated investigation into hitherto little known cosmopolitan practices and discourses in Scotland’s long Victorian period.
Statement: I am delighted to receive an honorary mention for this article. It was exciting to realise that Scotland’s working-class poets in the nineteenth century included an Islamic convert, and it was a pleasure to use his life and works as a way to think more about Scottish cosmopolitanism and its intersection with Scottish identities.
Alessandra Petrina (Università degli Studi di Padova) was awarded an Honourable Mention for her chapter ‘Translations Facing Inwards: James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron,’ which was published in the collective monograph Traduire. Tradurre. Translating. Vie des mots et voies des œuvres dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (Droz, 2022). The chapter provides a searching and original examination of the translation process of James VI/I’s text in relation to the final translation product and its reception.
Statement: I am very happy and honoured to have received an honourable mention in the Jack Medal 2022 competition for my ‘Translations facing inwards: James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron.’ This is a chapter in a volume edited by Jean-Louis Fournel and Ivano Paccagnella, Traduire – Tradurre – Translating (Droz, 2022), the outcome of a multilingual project which explored translation in early modern Europe. Within this project, I examined Basilikon Doron, its early editorial history and some of its translations (one by the King himself, from Middle Scots to English, another by John Florio, into Italian), analysing them as part of the king’s construction of an international political network. Translation is therefore analysed as a linguistic as well as a political act, and the literary work is seen not as simply the outcome of a single mind but as the production of a complex and articulate scribal community within which the translator has a prominent role. With the publication of Basilikon Doron, King James made a political statement in the international community, a statement that became modified and amplified with the successive translations. The analysis of this work offers us a unique perspective into the positioning of Scotland in early modern Europe.
2021
Bryony Coombs (University of Edinburgh) was awarded the 2021 Jack Medal for her chapter ‘Albany and the Poets: John Stuart, Duke of Albany, and the Transfer of Ideas Between Scotland and the Continent 1509-1536,’ which was published in Britain and its Neighbours: Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2021). The medal was awarded by the judging panel in recognition of the chapter’s extensive primary research which illuminates the transnational history of Renaissance Scotland in a precise, original, fresh and readable way.
Emilio Amideo (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’) was awarded an Honourable Mention for his chapter ‘Waves of Sound, Gender Fluidity, and Shifting Kinships in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet,’ which was published in Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2021). The judges agreed that the chapter provides a searching and original examination of diasporic and gender identities in Kay’s well-known novel in the wider, transnational context of Black Queer Diaspora.
2020
Anna Fancett (Sultan Qaboos University, Oman) for her article ‘Introducing Walter Scott: What Scott Scholars Can Learn from the Prefaces of Chinese Translations of Walter Scott’s Works’ which was published in The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 13: 2 (June 2020). The judges agreed that Fancett’s article offers a pioneering case study for the contemporary reception of the Waverley novels in China. By critically evaluating Chinese interpretive strategies within the theoretical frameworks of translation studies and world literature, and vis-à-vis current trends in Scott criticism outside China, the article identifies a new and important area of investigation.
2019
Céline Sabiron (Université de Lorraine, France) for her article ‘Amédée Pichot and Walter Scott’s Parrot: A Fabulous Tale of Parroting and Pirating’ which was published in Studies in Scottish Literature 44: 2 (2018). The judges appreciated Sabiron’s incisive analysis of nineteenth-century French translations of Walter Scott’s works explores the cultural as well as the linguistic dimensions of translation.
2018
Nikki Hessell (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) and Stephen Clothier (Wellington City Libraries, New Zealand) for their article ‘To Mary in Aotearoa: Burns’s “Thou Ling’ring Star” and Scottish Identity in New Zealand’ which was published in Scottish Literary Review 9: 2 (2017). The judges appreciated Thessell and Clothier’s consideration of Robert Burns’s reception in New Zealand opens up important discussions about diaspora, indigeneity, and literary interpretation in Scottish studies.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF SCOTTISH LITERATURES 