On Thursday 15th June 2017 we had a talk by Prof. Jeremy J. Smith. He was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside: (video below)
I’m particularly pleased to introduce as this evening’s speaker Professor Jeremy J. Smith. Having gained earlier degrees at King’s College, London, and Oxford University, Professor Smith received his doctorate at the University of Glasgow in 1985, and has held a Chair in English Philology there since 2000. His publications commencing in the 1980s have been both numerous and multifarious, and recent books include Sound Change and the History of English (Oxford UP, 2007) and Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader (Scottish Text Society, 2012). He is a specialist in English historical linguistics, and one of his main areas of study concerns Scots as a language and the use of English in Scotland. He is Convenor of the Board of Trustees of Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, and also a Co-Investigator of the AHRC-supported Editing Burns project. Among current work is a project on the theme of Textual Afterlives, engaging with the transmission of medieval texts in early modern and Enlightenment worlds and relating particularly to Scotland. His present talk (as he tells me) will pick up on ways in which medieval texts are reworked in later periods, with a special focus on vocabulary (and one assumes Walter Scott). The overall theme promises to be one of ‘invention’ in all its senses.
Above Image Copyright "Lee Live: Photographer" (Used with Permission)