[note: the topics listed below are suggestions and not limited to these areas only. If you have a topic not listed there, you are still welcome to submit it.]


*CALL FOR PAPERS*

The Lie of the Land: Scottish Landscape and Culture

Presented by
The Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Stirling
27-30 July 2006

Plenary speakers include:

Neal Ascherson, author of Stone Voices: the Search for Scotland
Prof Lawrence Buell (Harvard), author of The Environmental Imagination
Prof Steve Duguid (Simon Fraser), on John Muir
Prof Murdo Macdonald (Dundee), on revisualising the Highlands in art
James Robertson (novelist and poet) on history and place

CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited on the representation and interpretation of landscape in Scottish cultural production, including literature, drama, music,film, TV, print media, Scottish history, Scottish studies and the visual arts.

The focus can be urban or rural, historical or contemporary, but the central aim of this cross-disciplinary approach is to explore and compare the creative tensions between representation and reality and how the Scottish landscape has been perceived in creative, historical, canonical, critical and theoretical terms. Topics might include, for example:

*       Representations of Scottish landscape in literature or popular films.
*       Travel writing and landscape.
*       Comparative landscapes in writing about Scotland and abroad.
*       Representations of the land, weather, the animal kingdom etc from medieval to modern times.
*       Representations of industry and/or representations of the rural.
*       Urban landscapes in Scottish history and literature
*       The rise of landscape painting.
*       Landscape and photography; landscape and documentary film.
*       How historians have mapped / interpreted the geographical, cultural and economic features of the country.
*       Environmental and eco-critical reflections.


Papers should not be longer than 25 minutes. While formal papers will prevail, proposals for other means of exploring these issues will be welcome.

Further details will be announced on the conference website at
http://www.land.stir.ac.uk/

Inquires are welcome at any time. Please post, email or fax a one-page description of your proposed paper along with a brief CV before 1st February 2006.

Send to:

Professor Roderick Watson, r.b.watson@stir.ac.uk

Dr Suzanne Gilbert, suzanne.gilbert@stir.ac.uk

Department of English Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland

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The University of Stirling is a university established in Scotland by charter at Stirling, FK9 4LA.