Ann Rigney, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1957. Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University.
Fellow (1 September 2009 – 30 June 2010)
THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL REMEMBRANCE: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
Summary The greater part of my fellowship was spent on completing a monograph provisionally entitled “Portable Monuments: Forgetting and Remembering Walter Scott”, which examines the cultural afterlife of Scott’s work, and its role in shaping collective identities in the English-speaking world in the century between the first publication of Waverley (1814) and the outbreak of World War One. The manuscript is now under review at a leading publisher. As a by-product of the work on this book, I wrote an extensive article on the centenary of Robert Burns in 1859, now under review. The final months of my fellowship were spent on completing an article on the concept of historical narrative in the digital age, which is to appear in December 2010 in History and Theory; and on preparing an introduction to a special issue of Memory Studies on memory and reconciliation to appear in 2012, that I am co-editing.