Seminar für Englische Philologie

Conference: Crime Scotland - Then and Now

The English Department is proud to host
the Second Scottish Studies in Europe Conference on



Crime Scotland - Then and Now



from Thursday, May 31 to Sunday, June 3, 2012.





Scotland's literary and cultural heritage is infused with narratives of crime. Both real and imagined criminals have shaped the image of Scotland's dual soul. The tension between good and evil, salvation and redemption as well as beauty and repulsiveness lies at the heart of the Scottish Tartan Noir tradition, which has been thriving ever since Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critics have frequently used Gregory Smith's term “Caledonian antisyzygy” in order to express this duality of the Scottish character, yet up to this day neither the production nor the reception of Scotland's alleged split soul has been properly analyzed and understood.


This conference seeks to look at both literary and cultural forms of Scottish crime fiction in order to enhance our understanding of Crime Scotland – Then & Now. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary papers that look at Scottish crime narratives from a variety of angles. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers to be presented in May 2012 at the 2nd conference of the Society for Scottish Studies in Europe.


Topics for papers may include – but are not restricted to –the following subjects:



  • Scottish Crime Narratives Across the Genres (Thrillers, Science Fiction, Detective and Police Novels, Short Stories etc.)

  • Theorizing Scottish Crime Narratives

  • The Representation of Crime Scotland in Museums, Tourism & Popular Spaces

  • The Ex-Centric Detective: Scottish Crime Fiction Characters Then and Now

  • Scottish Criminography: Edinburgh, Glasgow and Other Scottish Crime Spaces

  • Gendered Crimes: Categories of Masculinity, Femininity, and Queerness in Scottish Crime Narratives

  • The Other in Scottish Crime Narratives

  • Crime Scotland in the Media: Scottish TV, Film, and the New Media

  • Exploding the Canon: Scotland's Forgotten Crime Narratives

  • The Sociology of Crimes

  • Crime Time: The Historiography of Crime Scotland