Regional Romanticism: Dumfriesshire and Galloway, 1770-1830 is a 3-year project running between 2017 and 2020.

The fellowship combines archival research and single-authored publications with a programme of events, delivered with partners from within academia and the region’s resurgent arts scene. It illuminates a neglected aspect of Scottish and British literary history, leveraging a regional perspective to reconsider the cultural politics of a formative period for modern Britain.

Key research questions include:

• What is distinctive about the Romantic literary construction of Dumfriesshire and Galloway?
• What is the relationship between the local, the national and the global in writing connected with the area?
• How does this case-study inflect our understanding of Romanticism on a Scottish and British scale?

Blog posts will chart the progress of the research. An annotated digital map of the region will be published to the site in the later part of the fellowship, to complement the main research outputs.

The Fellow:

Dr Gerard Lee McKeever has published a variety of work in his specialist field of Scottish Romanticism, including articles for Studies in Romanticism, Studies in Scottish Literature, Scottish Literary Review and Studies in Hogg and his World. His forthcoming monograph on the subject of Scottish Romanticism and improvement is contracted to Edinburgh University Press, while a collection of essays, co-edited with Alex Benchimol, Cultures of Improvement in Scottish Romanticism, 1707-1840, was published by Routledge in 2018.

Prior to his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Gerard was a Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21^st Century’ project at the University of Glasgow, where he completed a PhD in English Literature in 2014.