The University of Glasgow, College of Arts & Humanities, is delighted to welcome the 2024 Elizabeth Bishop Symposium to our beautiful, historic and friendly city. Following on from similar events in Oxford, Paris and Sheffield, Elizabeth Bishop in Glasgow provides an opportunity both to hear about recent and emerging work in Bishop Studies, and to consider Bishop’s writing in a Scottish Atlantic context – a legacy that helped to shape the history and culture of Great Village, Nova Scotia, Bishop’s maternal family home and her imaginative lodestone. Bishop was familiar from childhood with the poetry of Robert Burns (and had editions of his work in her adult library); our Symposium will consider the influence of Burns – and of other Scottish writers and artists – on Bishop’s writing. And it will ask, in turn, about Bishop’s influence on her successors in Scotland up to the present day.
Confirmed speakers include Professor Langdon Hammer (Yale University) and Victoria Fox (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Elizabeth Bishop in Glasgow is open to anyone with an interest in Bishop’s life, work and reception; in modern poetry; in Scottish and American literature and culture, in the Scottish Atlantic and in related fields. We welcome proposals for short papers (c. 20 minutes) or other forms of participation on these and related themes. Other areas of focus might include (but are not limited to):
Boundaries
Travel and walking
The North
Mystery
Bishop’s correspondence
Religion, Protestantism, the Bible
Language: Gaelic and Scots
Music, Scottish Song, hymns.
Diaspora
The Atlantic
Trade
Scottish Atlantic slavery
Publishing history
Visual culture
Bishop’s contemporaries
Bishop’s influence
Bishop in / and translation
Gender and sexuality
Robert Burns, Alexander Selkirk, Thomas and Jane Carlyle.
Please send brief proposals for papers, panels (3 contributors) or other forms of participation to:
vp-arts@glasgow.ac.uk by MONDAY 15th JANUARY 2024.
