The Project
This project explores Scotland’s artistic and cultural links with other countries at the end of the nineteenth century. Led by by Matthew Creasy (University of Glasgow) and Michael Shaw (University of Stirling), it was funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
From the paintings of the Glasgow boys and the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, to the journalism of Andrew Lang and Yetta Blaze de Bury, Scottish writers and artists were thoroughly engaged with their counterparts across Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Scholars have, however, tended to neglect Scotland in this period or dismiss it as a parochial, inward looking phase of Scottish cultural history; it has been written off as the era of the kailyard. So this project aims to redress this by exploring Scottish Cosmopolitanism at the Fin de Siècle. It asks how we can capture Scotland’s engagements with Europe and other parts of the world at the end of the Victorian era and, importantly, how these can be communicated to the broadest possible audiences.
This Site
Our original plans for the project included three meetings in Glasgow and Edinburgh. During the Covid19 pandemic, lockdown and social distancing measures, it was not possible to hold these meetings in person. Instead, we arranged a series of online events and you can access them through this site which now serves as a digital archive for the project.
If you click on the drop down menu called ‘Events’ at the top of this page, you’ll find videos, presentations and descriptions relating to each of three sessions that made up this workshop. For more information about the people who participated in these events, click the drop down menu called ‘Members’.
Future plans include applying to extend this initial iteration of the project into a Network, so that we can explore this field in even greater depth across an even wider variety of disciplines.
For questions about this project, please contact us via email here.