2011

Our President in 2011/2 was:

Emeritus Professor Claire Lamont

She proposed the Toast to Sir Walter at our 103rd Annual Dinner on Thursday 2nd March 2012 in The New Club, Edinburgh

Claire Lamont is Emeritus Professor of English Romantic Literature at Newcastle University. She has specialized in English and Scottish literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially Johnson and Boswell, Burns, Austen, Clare, Wordsworth and Scott. She is a General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, has edited Chronicles of the Canongate for the series, and is advisory editor for the titles which have appeared in paperback from Penguin.

She comes from both sides of the Anglo-Scottish Border. Her Scots father, born in Falkirk, graduated from Edinburgh University where he sat under the distinguished Scott scholar, H. J. C. Grierson. Her English mother was the daughter of Sir Edward Appleton, Principal of Edinburgh University (1949-65) and confirmed her Scots adoption by spending her last years in Melrose. Claire was educated at Esdaile, the Ministers' Daughters' College in Edinburgh, and went on to read English at the University. After acting as a research assistant to the late Professor A. N. Jeffares at Leeds University she went as a graduate to St Hilda's College Oxford, where she worked on the literary papers of the Fraser Tytler family from Invernesshire. After that archival start she worked in antiquarian bookselling in London for a year before being awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College, Oxford, where, under the guidance of the late Miss Mary Lascelles she embarked on an edition of Waverley which was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay prize by the British Academy on its publication by the Clarendon Press in 1981. She was appointed to Newcastle University in 1971 and has ensured the teaching of Scott there ever since.