2025

Our President for 2025/6 is:

Professor Peter Garside

He will propose the Toast to Sir Walter at our 116th Annual Dinner on 7th May 2026.

Peter Garside was educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and taught English Literature for more than thirty years at Cardiff University, where he became Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research. Subsequently he was appointed Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now a Professorial Fellow. He served on the Boards of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and the Stirling / South Carolina Collected Edition of the Works of James Hogg and has produced three volumes a piece for these endeavours, including Scott’s Waverley and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. He was one of the general editors of the ground-breaking bibliographical survey The English Novel 1770-1829 (OUP, 2000) and has since co-edited the critical collection English and British Fiction 1750-1820 (OUP, 2015). He has also directed two online databases in British Fiction 1800-1829 (2004) and Illustrating Scott (2009). More recent work includes editions of Walter Scott’s Shorter Poems (EUP, 2020) and J. G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (2 vols, EUP, 2022). His current project is a critical edition of Lockhart’s Life of Scott.

Peter has long been involved in the Club’s activities, writing the Introduction to Talking About Scott (1994), a compilation of past Presidential Addresses, and serving as Secretary between 2010 and 2015, and Chairman between 2016 and 2019. His essay on "The Scott Family Graves" is the most visited blog on the Club website.