Who was Robert Burns?
Join us on a SAHA Conversation with Dr Paul Malgrati and learn more about Scotland’s National Bard and the celebration of his life and works that takes place on his birthday, January 25h.
Dr Paul Malgrati is a scholar and poet from France, specialist of modern Scottish literature at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI).
Paul completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews as well as a two-year post-doctoral contract at the University of Glasgow. His award-winning research led to the publication of his first monograph, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics. The Bard of Contention. 1914-2014 (EUP, 2023), which explores Burns’s legacy in Scottish national culture, from Victorian unionism to contemporary nationalism.
Between 2018 and 2023, Paul has also completed three research projects: ‘Joe Corrie (1894-1968): Miner, Playwright, Activist’ (St Andrews, PI, 2018-19); ‘The Burns Supper in History and Today’ (Glasgow, RA, 2020-22) and ‘The Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation: Creating Digital Futures & Networks’ (Glasgow. RA, 2021-23).
Alongside scholarship, Paul is also known as a poet and translator. In 2020, his poetic work was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, which led to the publication Poèmes Écossais (Blue Diode Press, 2022): the first collection of poetry in the Scots language by a non-native anglophone. Such Franco-Scottish interests were also developed in Paul’s French translation of Robert Crawford’s Curriculum Violette, published in bilingual edition by Molecular Press in 2021. That same year, Paul also joined the team of Revue Écossaise, the first printed, Francophone magazine about Scotland (which has since developed into a podcast).
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