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Sarah DunniganOutline Biography
After graduating in English and Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow, Sarah Dunnigan completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh where she went on to hold a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for three years. She was appointed to a lectureship at Edinburgh in 2002. Her main teaching and research interests lie in medieval and Renaissance literature, especially Scottish; in fairy tales and traditional literature; and Scottish women writers. Sarah is co-editor (with Margery Palmer McCulloch) of the journal Scottish Literary Review [Website], and a General Editor of the SCROLL (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) series, published by Rodopi Press (Amsterdam) [Website].
Research Interests
Sarah has written on Renaissance Scottish literature, with a particular focus on the erotic writing of the courts of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI, and women writers, and on aspects of literary fairy tale collection and creation in Scotland in the late medieval period and the nineteenth century. She has also written about traditional Scottish ballads; mermaids in nineteenth-century Scottish literature and folklore; Robert Henryson; Robert Burns; Catherine Carswell; Nancy Brysson Morrison; A.L. Kennedy; and Alice Thompson.
Sarah would be happy to hear from potential research students interested in any of the following areas: Scottish medieval and Renaissance literature; medieval and Renaissance women writers; fairy tales; Scottish traditional literature, including the relationship between traditional belief and cultural history.
Research activity
Sarah’s current work is focused on the origins and development of the fairy tale in Scotland from the medieval to Romantic periods. She is completing a book on the subject entitled Enchanting Scotland. Fairies, Fairy Tales, and the Cultural Imagination, and is co-editing, with Suzanne Gilbert of Stirling University, The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Traditional Literatures. Sarah has also published an edition of Violet Jacob’s 1904 collection of fairy tales for children, The Golden Heart and other stories, an offshoot of longstanding interests in the history of Scottish children’s literature. This field, along with continuing and developing interests in Scottish early modern women’s writing and in the literary and cultural history of witchcraft in Scotland, form the threads of current research interests.
Publications
Publications list for Sarah Dunnigan
Teaching
- Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature
- Falling in Love in the Middle Ages
- Fairy Tales
- Feminising the Word: Women and Literature c1100-c1500
This article was published on Mar 18, 2011