2017

Our President in 2017/8 was:

Professor Alison Lumsden

She proposed the Toast to Sir Walter at our 109th Annual Dinner on 3rd May 2018 in The New Club, Edinburgh.

(Rescheduled from the 1st March 2018 due to exceptionally heavy snow) 

Alison Lumsden holds a Chair in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She works on all aspects of Scottish writing but specialises in Walter Scott. She has published many articles on Scott’s work including a 2010 monograph Walter Scott and the Limits of Language. She is the General Editor of a new critical edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and Director of the Walter Scott Research Centre at Aberdeen. She edited or co-edited The Pirate, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Woodstock and Peveril of the Peak for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and also edited Reliquiae Trotcosienses. She is Honorary Librarian at Abbotsford House, Walter Scott’s home in the Scottish Borders, and President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. She was for many years a judge for the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award, the main literary prize in Scotland, and for three years (2014 – 16) chaired the judging panel for the Saltire Society Research Book of the Year Award.