Dr Kate Ash-Irisarri (Medieval literature, University of Edinburgh) 14 April 2027

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Kate Ash-Irisarri works on memory, history of emotions and female reproduction in the late Middle Age and early Reformation period. Her book Rewriting the Past in Scottish Literature, 1350-1550 (Boydell and Brewer, 2025), explores how late–medieval writers drew on the memory of the wars to articulate a collective identity; and how literary and historical frameworks were deeply influenced by shifting Anglo-Scottish relations. It covers a range of topics: how borders – textual, geographic, and cultural – became a focus for articulations of national memory; the utilisation of origin myths and royal genealogy; anxieties around failures of memory or deliberate acts of forgetting; and the impact of the Battle of Flodden (1513) on writing about Scottish nationhood.