International Review of Scottish Studies
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scottish Studies Foundation (CA) |
| ISSN | 1923-5755 / 1923-5763 |
| Wikidata | Q50806610 |
| OpenAlex | S2764997145 |
| MAG | 2764997145 |
| Website | http://www.irss.uoguelph.ca/ |
| Total publications | 69 |
| Coverage period | 2007 - 2026 |
| Country | CA |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Cited by | 2 |
| h-index | 1 |
This journal focuses on Scottish Studies, which falls under area studies. Such journals often feature substantive ethnographic, cultural, or social content relevant to social anthropology
American Constitutional Law and Politics · Australian History and Society · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Canadian Identity and History · Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
Scottish Food Patriotism and the Literary Antecedents of Robert Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’
This article re-evaluates Robert Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’—arguably, the most globally recited food poem in world literature—by situating it within a long-overlooked tradition of Scottish food patriotism. Drawing on literary antecedents from John Barbour and William Dunbar to William Drummond of Hawthornden, Allan Ramsay, Tobias Smollett, and Robert Fergusson, the authors show how Burns’s mock-heroic celebration of haggis synthesizes centuries of Sco…
A Feedback Loop in the Smuggling of Rum Based in Cumbrae, Scotland
South-west Scotland benefited greatly from slavery in the West Indies, especially by the production of sugar and rum on the plantations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, much of the produce entered Scotland through smuggling rather than by merchant shipping, and the economy of Ayrshire became strongly influenced by this local delivery of rum. In response, the revenue cutter for south-west Scotland, based in Millport …
Kate Anderson, Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn, and Liz Louis. Art and Court of James VI and I
enslaved people (in chapter 5), such as Janet Macarthur, a spinning mistress on the island of Lismore; Glasgow, a young enslaved boy living and working at a tobacco store in Colchester, Virginia; and Beck, an enslaved woman living beside him, with potential seamstress skills.Transatlantic Threads is a thorough and valuable book that will be of interest to economic, Scottish, Atlantic, and art historians alike, and an important contribution to pre…
The Afterlife of Patrick Sellar and the History of the Highland Clearances
This article concerns the continuing controversies around the actions and reputation of the sheep farmer and factor Patrick Sellar. His involvement in the Sutherland clearances and his trial and acquittal in the High Court ensured his contemporary reputation as one of the most loathed figures in the highlands. The article examines the way in which this reputation has been sustained in the period since his death in 1851 and emphasizes the role of …
Frances Poet. Small Acts of Love . Directed by Dominic Hill, music and lyrics by Ricky Ross. Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 9 September–4 October 2025
Emerging from a seven-year renovation, the old-new Citizens Theatre of Glasgow reopened with an ambitious historical-docudrama-musical play based on the most difficult of topics: the bombing of Pan Am 103 on 21 December 1988.The deliberate destruction of a Boeing 747 en route from London to New York in the skies over the Scottish borders remains the largest case of mass murder in Scottish history and the deadliest terrorist atrocity in British hi…
Gordon Graham. David Hume and the Aberdeen Philosophers
What Do Philosophers Believe?' identified with David Hume (1711-76) than with any other non-living philosopher. 1 Monty Python famously accused Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) of being a 'pissant.'But the worst they would muster against Hume was the accusation that he could outdrink G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831).Hume is essential reading in most undergraduate philosophy programs, often cast as the greatest philosopher to write originally in the English langu…
Sally Tuckett. Transatlantic Threads
Within the incredible archives held at Syracuse are a plethora of documents in which the contraction is laid bare: the victims' families consistently emphasized their appreciation and debt to the people of Scotland, whilst campaigning for justice and the prevention of a similar tragedy occurring again.Suse Lowenstein, for example, revealed at the time how her son Alexander's remains were returned to the John F. Kennedy Airport at an area used for…
The Early Lobster Fishery in Beàrnaraigh na Hearadh, 1850–1930
The history of lobster fishing in Beàrnaraigh na Hearadh (Berneray, Harris) reveals how Gaelic communities adapted to the socio-economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century, shaped by clearance, migration, and industrialization. This article explores the evolution of the lobster fishery from circa 1850 to 1930, drawing on under-utilized oral histories and Gaelic folklore from the Tobar an Dualchais online resource. These sources, often overl…
Sovereignty across the Atlantic
Starting in 1621, Sir William Alexander and his allies laid out a vision for a New Scotland on par with New Spain, New France, and New England. This vision was a transatlantic projection of the idea that Scotland was a sovereign kingdom equal in standing with the other kingdoms of Europe. It was of particular importance in relation to the 1603 Union of the Crowns as Scottish elites were concerned that the union may result in the loss of Scotland’…
Audrey Murfin. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration L. M. Ratnapalan. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific
Donald S. Murray. Leaving Songs
Westminster Politicians and Rectorial Elections in Scotland's Universities, 1820–1920
This article focuses on the relationship of Westminster politicians to rectorial elections at Scottish universities between the first obviously ‘political’ contest at Glasgow in 1820 and Lloyd George’s triumph in Edinburgh in 1920. It argues that the widely reported return of Sir Robert Peel at the University of Glasgow in 1836 underlined the partisan political potential of the elections and established many of the features of the subsequent elec…
Researching the Roses
Families at Sea
Emigration was a process that was fundamentally defined by family. The decision to migrate was often made for the long-term well-being of the family, and travelling as a unit was a distinct experience to that of solo migrants. This article examines the transatlantic voyage and how, on the one hand, travelling in a family shaped the experience of shipboard life, psychologically and practically. On the other hand, the journey shaped family life, fo…
Edward Masson
This research note publishes and contextualises a Greek-language naval diploma issued in 1827. It was drafted in the context of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821–32), in which foreign volunteers also participated. The signatory of the document was Edward Masson, a Scot from Kincardineshire. Masson served as personal secretary to Thomas Cochrane, later 10th Earl of Dundonald, during the latter’s brief stint as admiral of …
The Cotton Famine and the Decline of the Scottish Cotton Industry
This article argues that the Scottish industry recovered fairly quickly from the cotton famine but declined steeply in the late nineteenth century. The article analyses the wills and inventories of fifty Scottish cotton masters and sixty-one Glasgow West India merchants from 1783 to 1912—a total sample of 111. From the 1830s, Scottish cotton masters diversified their portfolios into iron and steel manufacturing, engineering, railways, chemicals, …
Sonic Littorals of The Outrun (2024)
Stuart S. Dunmore. New Gaelic Speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland
Adapting Sunset Song
This article traces the discourses shaping the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song, directed by Terence Davies. In doing so, it shows how both the film and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's original novel are involved in complex negotiations of ideas about Scottishness. In the case of the film, this is evident in its sophisticated and poetic visual engagement with some aspects of the novel's characterization of Chris Guthrie, its use of language, and its re…
Peter Doig
Military Roads and King’s Houses
Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources pertaining to military roads and King’s Houses, this paper highlights the significance of space and material culture during the century of conflict, mobility, and cultural assimilation that drew the Scottish Highlands and Gaelic culture into the nation-state of Great Britain. The original fieldwork presented here locates, identifies, and analyzes lost inns known as King’s Houses, government-owne…
The New Scottish Galleries at the National, Edinburgh
‘Hunger Added the Best of Sauce’
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English and Scottish gentry-class travellers took journeys into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and wrote about their experiences. They made observations about foods, especially meals cooked and served by women innkeepers, at accommodations along the way. By analyzing written travellers’ accounts, this study uncovers foodways and the daily lives of women who were working—and cooking—as innkeepers …
An Interview with Amina Shah, National Librarian of Scotland
W. Hamish Fraser. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Newspapers, 1850–1950
Sir Walter Scott and the French Press
Peintre de la nature et de la vrit Toi dont la muse unit la grce et la beaut des Vierges d'aonie; J'admire tes romans, j'honore ton gnie dont la gloire s'envole l'immortalit. Ah! Dans ta brillante carrire Tu ne moissonnes que des fleurs, Et tu ressembles Molire Qui n'eut jamais d'imitateurs. 1 he above flawed poem, 2 a panegyric to Scott, states, unabashedly, the general climate of admiration for the Scottish poet and novelist throughout Europe i…
Culture at the Core
Witchcraft and Family
Digital Initiatives in Scottish Studies
An introduction to the Digital Humanities Special Feature
Gender, Authority, and Control
Sixteenth-century discourse is filled with criticisms about the ambition of women and the proletariat. This article explores the connection between gender, ambition, authority, reputation, and the language of condemnation at the Jacobean court. It argues that the prevailing rhetoric vilifying female ambition reflects contemporaneous anxieties about female dominance and authority. In turn, male invective, libel, and slander, directed toward politi…
Alison Chand. Masculinities on Clydeside
Review of Alison Chand. Masculinities on Clydeside: Men in Reserved Occupations During the Second World War
The Use of Lockhart’s Memoirs (1714) in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century Whig Historians of the Anglo-Scottish Union (1707)
Eighteenth-century whig historians of the Union (1707) reacted to Lockhart’s tory-jacobite Memoirs in different ways. While John Oldmixon (1672-1742) incorporated passages from them into his account of the Union for the sake of confuting them, Abel Boyer (1667-1729) and Nicholas Tindal (1687-1774) endorsed them to a large degree, borrowing from them extensively. Then, several historians writing in the mid- to late eighteenth century such as Thoma…
The Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History
Virginia Blankenhorn. Tradition, Transmission, Transformation
Mapping the Scottish Reformation
This article introduces readers to Mapping the Scottish Reformation, a digital prosopography of ministers who served in the Church of Scotland between the Reformation Parliament of 1560 to the Revolution in 1689. By extracting data from thousands of pages of ecclesiastical court records held by the National Records of Scotland, Mapping the Scottish Reformation (MSR) tracks clerical careers, showing where they were educated, how they moved between…
“Ours is a Court of Papers”
This essay describes the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project (SCOS), a multi-institutional collaborative research initiative into Early America and the British Atlantic world. Developed by the digital scholarship team at the University of Virginia Law Library, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, SCOS explores everyday life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through Session Papers, the printed…
Witchcraft against Royal Danish Ships in 1589 and the Transnational Transfer of Ideas
This article deals with transnational transfer of ideas about witchcraft at the end of the sixteenth century. The outset is alleged witchcraft performed against a royal Danish fleet that was to carry Princess Anne across the North Sea to her husband, King James VI of Scotland, autumn 1589, and following trials in Copenhagen. These include court records from witchcraft trials and diplomatic correspondence between Denmark, England and Scotland. By …
Scott Hames. The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution
A Modern Bannatyne
This essay introduces the Bannatyne Manuscript as an historical and literary artefact and describes the process through which it is being digitized. The importance of this project lies in its goal of making this important manuscript more easily accessible. In addition to discussing the method behind the manuscript’s digitization, it also examines issues related to the creation of digital editions more broadly while examining the editorial process…
Women, Gender, and the Kirk Before the Covenant
This article explores the ways women interacted with the Scottish kirk in the decades prior to the National Covenant of 1638, mainly focusing on urban areas especially Edinburgh and environs. The written records, especially those of the kirk session, are skewed toward punishing women who engaged in sin, especially sexual sins such as adultery and fornication. Indeed, these records show that while women’s behavior and speech was highly restricted …
Veronica Strong-Boag. Liberal Hearts and Coronets
Review of Veronica Strong-Boag, Liberal Hearts and Coronets: The Lives and Times of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, The Aberdeens
Greetings from Scotland
This article describes the background behind and the process of the digitization of travel ephemera contained within the University of Guelph’s Scottish Studies Collection. Developed as an experiential learning opportunity for undergraduate students at the University of Guelph, this project explores the place that postcards held in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland, the technologies involved with the printing and creation of postcards, t…
Victoria Henshaw. Scotland and the British Army, 1700–1750
Review of Victoria Henshaw. Scotland and the British Army, 1700–1750: Defending the Union
John Campbell’s “Short Papers” for Lord Bute in the London Evening Post
John Campbell’s (1708-1775) biographer, Guido Abbattista, has argued that Campbell sought to publish a pamphlet, Thoughts on Public Affairs, in 1761. However, a review of Campbell’s private correspondence in 1761 with the future prime minister, John Stuart, 3rd earl of Lord Bute (1713-1792), indicates that the historian sought not to publish a pamphlet, but newspaper articles that promote the king’s new reign and his administration. Six of these …
R. Andrew McDonald. The Sea Kings
Review of R. Andrew McDonald. The Sea Kings: The Late Norse Kingdoms of Man and the Isles, c. 1066–1275
Eva von Contzen. The Scottish Legendary
Gender, Resistance and Conformity in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1650
The article claims that men and women in mixed marriages often subverted patriarchal norms when attempting to escape ecclesiastical censure in early modern Scotland. Ministers held husbands responsible for ensuring the conformity of their households, and they insisted that Protestant husbands bring their wives into the fold. These husbands then argued that they had no right to compel their wives in matters of conscience. Some even insisted that t…
David Torrance. Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives
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Yvonne McEwen. In the Company of Nurses
Review of Yvonne McEwen. In the Company of Nurses: The History of the British Army Nursing Service in the Great War
R. J. Morris