Scottish Studies Faculty Fellow
Scottish Studies Faculty Fellow 2010-12
Iain Macleod Higgins has taught at the University of Victoria since 2001. He was the Director of the Medieval Studies Program from 2006 to 2009, a member of the Advisory Board to the Canadian Society of Medievalists from 2003 to 2005, and an Associate Editor (Poetry) with the journal Canadian Literature from 1995 to 2003. His teaching and research interests include later medieval literature, travel writing, and poetry both medieval and modern. His interest in Scottish literature and culture extends to all of these areas as well, but his research there is focussed especially on the work of the “Makars,” the major poets of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas) and the best writers in Scots before Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid.
His publications on medieval Scottish literature include “Tit for Tat: The Canterbury Tales and ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’” (2004) and “Shades of the East: Orientalism, Religion, and Nation in Late-Medieval Scottish Literature” (2008). The more recent essay shows how some late-medieval poets used images from international conflict in the Crusader’s East to demonize their enemies in local conflicts between highlander and lowlander or Scot and Sassenach (Anglo-Saxon). The earlier essay examines the medieval genre of flyting, a poetic contest of virtuoso verbal abuse that was particularly well-developed in late-medieval Scotland (and is timidly echoed on the modern-day bumper sticker that proclaims “If it’s nae Scottish, it’s crap”). During the period of the Fellowship, Iain plans to return to his study of flyting, examining the genre’s translations and transformations in three larger contexts as they bear on the Scottish examples: first, that of medieval literary invective generally, which was quite widely practiced in Latin and other languages; secondly, that of insult and abuse in relation to right speech, which was a concern especially of medieval religious teaching; and thirdly, that of formalized insult and abuse as a mode of speech which one finds in disparate literary and cultural contexts, ancient, medieval, and modern, including those of both the epic and the musical genres of rap and hip-hop, which share an emphasis on hyper-masculine verbal virtuosity.
Previous Fellows
| 2006-08 | Paul Wood |
| 2008-10 | Patrick Rysiew |