Our President in 2015/16 was:

Professor Gerard Carruthers

He proposed the Toast to Sir Walter at our 107th Annual Dinner on 10th March 2016.

Professor Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Chair of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.

He is Principal Investigator for the major project 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century' (awarded £1.1 million by the AHRC in 2011), General Editor of the new Oxford Collected Works of Robert Burns and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow.

He is Convener of the 'Burns Scotland' partnership (the National Burns Collection) and is also his university's representative on the Joint Abbotsford Advisory Committee guiding research into the library of Walter Scott.

He has been Visiting Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Visiting Research Fellow at the University of South Carolina, Visiting Research Fellow at All Souls, Oxford, and an external examiner for a range of United Kingdom and overseas universities. He is on the editorial board of seven academic journals and has written or edited fifteen books and over one hundred and fifty essays and reviews. He is editor of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Scottish Literary Review. As well as UK research councils he has reviewed for the Irish Arts & Social Sciences Research Council and is a member of the peer-review college of the Australian Research Council. Most recently he has been awarded two Carnegie major grants, with Professor Colin Kidd, for the project 'Literature & Union' which runs from 2013-2015, culminating in the book Literature & Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts from the Reformation to the Referendum (to be published by OUP in 2017); and 'The People's Voice: Scottish Political Poetry, Song and the Franchise, 1832-1918', with Dr Catriona Macdonald (University of Glasgow) and Prof Kirstie Blair (University of Stirling), running from 2016-2018.

He was born in Stirlingshire, brought up in Clydebank, and prior to taking up a post at the University of Glasgow, was Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde (1995-2000) and British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen (1993-5) working on the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. From this last connection came his co-edited edition [with Professor Alison Lumsden] of Walter Scott's unpublished work, Reliquiae Trotcosienses (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Among a number of current scholarly advisory boards, he sits on those for the new edition of the Poetry of Walter Scott and the Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson (both Edinburgh University Press).