Scottish History: The Making of a Discipline

Our final talk of the session will be on Thursday, 8 March at 7.30, in the Lecture Room of Paisley Museum and Art Gallery. The speaker will be Dr Catriona M.M. Macdonald, Reader in Late Modern Scottish History and Director of the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow. Visitors are welcome, at a cost of £3.00,

Please note this meeting will be proceeded by the AGM at 7.15.

Dr MacDonald has given the following information about her talk:

Tonight Dr Macdonald will address the Paisley Philosophical Institution on ‘Scottish History: the making of a discipline’. She will examine the way in which Scottish history emerged in the universities in the nineteenth century but also explore its cultivation in associations and civic institutions across Scotland. She will address the thorny question of the extent to which a genuinely British history emerged in the nineteenth century and the role of literary approaches to Scotland’s past. She raises what for an academic is a troubling prospect – namely, that generations of  historians were in part to blame for the Scottish public’s lack of awareness of their own past.