• EUP 75: Our Publishing in Scottish Studies

    Discover the story of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University Press – the first publications, the books that changed the field and what you can expect to see in future

    Read more: EUP 75: Our Publishing in Scottish Studies

David Barnes

Exploring transatlantic cultural exchanges

By David Barnes With President Obama’s intervention in the British EU Referendum debate still fresh in the mind, it’s worth reflecting on the importance of the transatlantic axis for culture and history. For the Exit camp Obama’s intervention proved the…

What do Monks and Friars have in common?

By Eva Pascal What do Buddhist monks and Christian friars have in common? Quite a bit, in fact. While travelling widely across Asia in the late sixteenth century, Franciscans had rich encounters and exchanges with Buddhist monks that led them…

On Wasting Time

By Claire White In France, the turn of the millennium ushered in a bold, and controversial, act of legal reform that sought to reshape the French citizen’s working life: the introduction of a 35-hour working week. For many, the law…

Deanna Womack

Images of Islam

By Deanna Ferree Womack Images of Islam abound these days, and many of them are troubling. Those who speak loudly and most forcefully define Islam in the narrowest of terms, making one image – the militant extremist – into a…

Shakespeare, Art and Life

By Andy Mousley I sometimes wonder which of Shakespeare’s characters most closely resembles Shakespeare himself: ambitious Macbeth? brooding Hamlet? the simultaneously romantic and anti-romantic Rosalind? It’s idle speculation, of course. Less idle (because the evidence is before us) is to…

Shakespeare’s Metadrama and the Informer

By Bill Angus If you have ever wondered what was really going on in the secret overhearing and tacit observations, the metadramatic inner-plays and devices which Shakespeare constantly revisits, you may have been told that he was ‘playing with the…

St. William of Stratford?

By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…

Shakespeare’s Questions

By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…

Human Rights Language in the 1890s

By Anna Clark It is widely assumed that the concept of human rights only emerged after 1945. However, I have found that the concept of human rights was deployed in Britain in the 1890s. For instance, in 1898 Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner…