Promoting Scottish literatures globally
We are a worldwide academic organisation dedicated to cultivating the study of Scottish languages, literatures and cultures across the globe.
The Executive Committee 2023-2026
CONVENER
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Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon is Professor of British Literature at Aix-Marseille Université ​(AMU). Her research interests focus on 20th and 21st-century Scottish literature. She is the author of The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a Post-devolution Age (2015), editor of Women and Scotland: Literature, Culture, Politics (2020), co-editor of Scottish Writing after Devolution: Edges of the New (2022), and author of articles on Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Louise Welsh, Janice Galloway, James Robertson, Suhayl Saadi, Irvine Welsh, Alice Thompson, Jackie Kay, Roseanne Watt, or Jenni Fagan.
SECRETARY & MEMBERSHIP
Petra Johana Poncarová is a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Glasgow, and has been working mostly on modern writing in Scottish Gaelic. With the ASL, she published a Scotnote on Thomson’s Gaelic poetry in 2020, and her monograph Derick Thomson and the Gaelic Revival is forthcoming from the Edinburgh University Press. She is one of the co-directors of Ionad Eòghainn MhicLachlainn | National Centre for Gaelic Translation and translates directly from Gaelic into Czech. Her translations include the novel Deireadh an Foghair by Tormod Caimbeul and poetry by Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin, Pàdraig MacAoidh, Niall O'Gallagher, and Ruaraidh MacThòmais. She was the manager of the 3rd World Congress of Scottish Literatures (Prague, 2022).
TREASURER | Pauline Mackay
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEMBERS
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Corey Gibson is lecturer in twentieth-century Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics (EUP, 2015) – which was shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year – and editor of The Collected Poems of Hamish Henderson (Polygon, 2019). He is the principal investigator on a Carnegie Trust-funded project: 'Dreaming the Daily Darg: Working Lives in Scottish Fiction since 1918'. Corey is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on balladry and critical theory; extremism and poiesis; war poetry; anonyms and the folk process; class and nationalism; flyting; and folk revivalism.
Scott Lyall is Associate Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. His main research interests are in the areas of twentieth-century literature and Modernism, especially in Scotland, and much of his work concerns the interwar revival in Scottish literature known as the Scottish literary renaissance, on which he has published widely and been interviewed on TV and radio. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place (published by Edinburgh University Press), co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, and editor of The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Community in Modern Scottish Literature. Dr Lyall was project leader of the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded The Scottish Revival Network (2021-23), and is currently co-editor of Scottish Literary Review.
Hongling Lyu is Professor of English Literature, Head of Foreign Languages and Cultures Center, and Head of Scottish Studies Center of Nanjing Normal University, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen (2019), visiting scholar to the University of Edinburgh (2004), Harvard University (2010), and the University of Glasgow (2014). She currently serves as General Secretary of Jiangsu Association of Foreign Literature Studies. She has published Contemporary Scottish Fiction (2019), Virginia Woolf’s Textual World (2013), and is working on Scottish Enlightenment Literature, funded by a National Social Science Grant. Her essays about Scottish literature, including those on Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, and Henry Mackenzie, have appeared in such major journals as Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, Foreign Languages Research, etc. She edited and published five translated books of Scotnotes in Chinese in cooperation with ASLS in 2020. She was also the leading organizer, in association with the University of Glasgow, of an on-line international Scottish Literature Conference in Nanjing, China in 2021.
Paul Malgrati was born in France and moved to Scotland in 2013, earning his award-winning PhD in Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews in 2020. From 2020 to 2022 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow's Centre for Robert Burns Studies where he published an interactive world map of Burns Suppers. In 2023, he published his first monograph, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics. The Bard of Contention (1914-2014) with Edinburgh University Press. This was Paul's second book, following the publication of his debut collection, Poèmes Écossais (Blue Diode Press, 2022): the first book of Scots poetry by a non-native Anglophone, which was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Prize in 2020. At the moment, Paul remains involved in several scholarly ventures as an independent. These include the University of Glasgow's project to revive the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation as well as a new edition of Alan Sharp's A Green Tree in Gedde (1965) for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (forthcoming in 2025).
Steve Newman is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where he specializes in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century and Scottish Literature. He is the author of Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon (Penn), articles on Robert Burns, Allan Ramsay, songs in Shakespeare, personal statements for medical school, and a forthcoming essay in ELH on Adam Smith and questions of value. He is the textual editor of The Gentle Shepherd (2022), the first volume of The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay by Edinburgh University Press, and is the director of a DH project on The Beggar’s Opera. He is currently working on Time for the Humanities: Learning from the Competing Narratives of Value in the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Romanticism. From 2017-21, he served as the President of The Temple Association of University Professionals (AFT #4531), the labor union representing full-time and part-time faculty, librarians, and academic professionals at Temple.
Charles Sabatos is a Professor in the English Language and Literature department at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, where he lectures on American, Slavic, and comparative literature. A native of Pittsburgh, PA and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (founded by Dunfermline native Andrew Carnegie), he also studied at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan. His research is mainly focused on transnational contexts of Central European (Czech and Slovak) literature, and his book Frontier Orientalism and The Turkish Image in Central European Literature was published in 2020. While he has a longstanding interest in Scottish modernist fiction, it was his research in the historical novel that led him to give Scottish topics a more prominent role in his current research and teaching. He is particularly interested in the Scottish Renaissance, and in writers and translators from Scotland who have engaged with Central European literature and culture.
Pilar Somacarrera-Íñigo is Full Professor of Literatures in English at the English Studies Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published widely on Canadian women writers, especially on Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. In July 2014, she was awarded the Saltire Scholarship for Scottish Literature to attend the Scottish Literature Section of Scottish Universities International Summer School (SUISS). The outcome of this grant is her MA course about Contemporary Scottish Literature at UAM which she has successfully taught during six academic years. She was a visiting fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh between January and July 2015 to work on a project about the connections between Scottish literature and Anglo-Canadian Literature, which resulted in several articles about the Scottish connections of mainstream Canadian authors such as Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Her latest publication about Scottish Studies is her chapter “Cultural Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Culture in the Discourses about the Independence of Scotland by Scottish writers” in V. Luarrsabishvili (ed.), Rethinking Society. Individuals, Culture and Migration (New Vision University Press, 2023).
Monika Szuba is Associate Professor at the University of Gdańsk. She has published on Scottish and English poetry and prose. Co-editor of Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern (Brill, 2022), The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019), and editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2015). She is author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Landscape Poetics: Scottish Textual Practice, 1928-Present (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2023).