We’re excited to announce the forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies ‘Scotland, Culture and Empire’. The issue draws upon the work presented during the University of Aberdeen’s Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies’ digital workshop in September 2021. Titled ‘Scotland, Ireland and the Cultural Artefacts of Colonialism’ this workshop invited participants to examine the ways in which the cultural artefacts of colonialism have featured in Scottish and Irish life in the past, how they persist today, and how they might be understood in the future. Conceiving of the ‘cultural artefact’ in its broadest possible sense, to include not just physical artefacts but also music, food cultures, and texts, the session brought graduate students, museum professionals, and scholars from across a wide range of disciplines together.
The special issue, edited by Dr Sarah Sharp, represents one of the outputs to emerge from this event. Focusing on Scottish cultural legacies, it features work by Carissa Chew (University of Hawaii), Iain Watson (University of Edinburgh), Alison Clark (National Museums of Scotland), Matthew Lee (University of Aberdeen), L. M. Ratnapalan (Yonsei University), and Andrew Bull (University of Glasgow). Their papers consider a diverse range of legacies: from the role of colonial wealth in eighteenth-century Scottish music making and publishing, to the connections between canonical nineteenth-century novelists and the colonial world, and the process of decolonizing collections descriptions in contemporary Scottish heritage institutions. Together they make a convincing case for the continued investigation of colonial legacies across the whole field of Scottish cultural studies.