Literature & Language
Welcome
Welcome to Highlands and Islands Literature! We are part of the Language, Literature and Heritage research centre within the University of the Highlands and Islands Institute for Northern Studies and as a group of scholars and creatives specialising in the literature of the Scottish North.
The courses we offer include MLitt in Highlands and Islands Literature ,MLitt Scottish Heritage and BA in Culture & Heritage
This year also witnessed the unveiling of INS’s newest postgraduate programme, the Early Modern European Studies (EMES) MLitt, which launched in September. Housed within INS, the EMES programme draws upon the research expertise of UHI staff across the disciplines of Northern Studies, History, Archaeology, Theology and Literature. Built upon this research-led approach, EMES provides a purpose-built taught masters which equips students with a multifaceted and thorough understanding of early modern Europe.
The heritage and tourism sector in Scotland is growing rapidly and to provide the students with appropriate skills, INS is continually looking to develop its portfolio of courses tailored to working within and around this sector.
Having run a highly successful Cert HE in tourist guiding for the North Highlands for many years, we refocussed and relaunched the programme in 2024 under a bold new identity: Cert HE Highland Heritage for Tourism.
Postgraduate Students
- Theresa Jane Bury (MRes) ‘Decent Women’ - Helen MacInnes’s War Novels and the Transition in Attitudes Towards Women and War
- Alicen Geddes (PhD) Lady Ermingerðr Reimagined: Orkneyinga Saga’s Stanzaic Evolution Examined
- Anthony Olsson PhD Student (PhD) Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic balladry: motifs and intercultural connections
- Jimm Simon (PhD) Robert Louis Stevenson: Literary innovator or commercial imitator?
Student Story
"When I was first searching for the right graduate school, UHI's MLitt: Highlands and Islands Literature program immediately drew me in with its strong focus on the relationship between literature and place. From my very first module, I have been impressed by how this study brings together a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives while maintaining a concentrated focus on the distinct body of Highland and Island literature. This approach has given me further insights into how literature depicts, responds to, and shapes places and patterns - travel, tourism, politics, and the evolving idea of 'home' - across history. I am now beginning my dissertation module, where I plan to examine ecological memory in a specific Scottish location and explore how literature both adapts to and addresses relevant issues of modernisation and environmental concern." Scotti Moody (Arkansas, USA)
Research Projects and Scholarly Volumes
Donna Heddle, Paul Malgrati (eds), France and Scotland in Literature. Auld and New Alliances. (Leyden: Brill, 2026). This volume, co-edited by Prof Heddle and Dr Malgrati will be a groundbreaking addition to the SCROLL series (Scottish Review of Language and Literature) aims to highlight the rich cultural and literary connections between France and Scotland from the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. This is the first ever scholarly compilation blending works on French-influenced Scottish literature and Scotland-inspired French writing.
Paul Malgrati, Colin McIlroy (eds), A Green Tree in Gedde by Alan Sharp (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2026). This is a slick scholarly re-edition of Alan Sharp’s acclaimed debut novel from 1965, A Green Tree in Gedde: a beatnik adventure leading its characters from the West of Scotland to London, Paris, and Germany and featuring an exciting existential quest, between Presbyterian redemption and sexual liberation. The new edition features a fresh critical introduction as well as note apparatus by Dr Malgrati.
Paul Malgrati, Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics. The Bard of Contention. 1914-2014 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) is Dr Malgrati’s first monograph, stemming from his award-winning PhD. It focusses on the contentious legacy of Robert Burns, Scotland’s best-known and most influential poet. Burns’s ambiguous verse, oscillating between patriotic odes, egalitarian lines, and royalist songs, lends itself to interpretations from across the political divide. At the crossroads of political history and literary studies, Paul’s monograph provides the first book-length study of Burns’s political legacy in modern and contemporary Scotland.
Mandy Haggith Peat, Diesel and Seaweed was an AHRC-funded project run jointly with North West 20245, a network of community organisations, businesses and landowners in Sutherland, co-designing the green transition. The project used poetic inquiry to explore local people’s thoughts and feelings about peatland restoration, alternatives to marine diesel and seaweed cultivation and harvest. A follow-up project, called Youth Futures, focusing on intergenerational dialogue about the green transition, is under development though a knowledge exchange challenge fund grant. This work builds on an earlier poetic inquiry into marine culture as part of the North West Highland Geopark’s Blue Corridor project.