On Saturday 26th September I headed to the University of Guelph to attend the Fall meeting of the Center for Scottish Studies. And as is getting normal these days I took some pictures to try and give a flavour of the day. I might add that I did in fact stay at the Holiday Inn at Guelph on the night of 25th and so took in a dinner at Diana Downtown (www.dianadowntown.com) with Graeme Morton and some of the speakers and also Nola Crewe.  It was an excellent dinner and if get a chance to go out for a meal in Guelph I'd highly recommend this restaurant.

As usual books were on sale both modern and antiquarian and then it was heading into the conference room and Dr Graeme Morton opened the conference.

The first speaker was Mairi Cowan on "Kindred Spirits: Kinship, Identity, and Religious Responsibility in Scottish Towns, 1350 - 1560".

The second speaker was Gillian Leitch on "Robert Burns as a Symbol of Montreal Scottish Identity, 1801 - 1875" after which we had our first break. Gillian kindly sent me in a copy of her talk which you can read at http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/symbol.htm

Took a few pictures and as on the left is Alan McKenzie and his friend and on the right Graame Morton and Gillian Leitch

On the left is Jenny Wormald who would be giving a talk after the break with Mairi Cowan and on the right is Sandy MacKay of the Fallbrook Heritage Project talking with interested spectators.

I noted two very interesting books on Sandy's table so took a picture so I could check up on them afterwards.

 
And of course I needed to take some pictures of a fellow director of the Scottish Studies Foundation and the workers that did an excellent job of setting up this event.

And a quick snap of David Hunter, President of the Scottish Studies Foundation

 
And then it was back for The Third Annual Jill McKenzie Memorial Lecture given by Jenny Wormald on "Godly Scotland: Myth or Reality?" This took us up to Lunch.

As I headed out for a smoke break came across some of the students heading to a football match and as they all looked bright and cheerful thought I'd get a picture :-)  On the right we're all sitting down to partake of an enjoyable lunch which comes free with the price of the ticket!

After lunch it was over to Dr Graeme Morton to give a review of the work of his Centre for Scottish Studies which included giving out awards. And as I'm famous for never remembering names please feel free to email me with the recipients names and I can add them in :-)

We were also told about the Certificate in Scottish Studies

We then had a presentation given by Kathryn Harvey, head of the University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections.

This was followed by Sandy MacKay giving a talk on "The Ballinafad Oral History Project" and also talking about the Fallbrook Project. As I am helping Sandy with his project I took a video of his talk.  As the main avi file is over 1Gbyte in size I have done my best to crunch it down and have a couple of options to view this...

The first is an mp4 file of 94Mb

The second option is a .rm file which can be viewed as a Real Media movie but now at 12.8Mb

Obviously the smaller file will not give you the quality but at least you can hear the talk.

And then it was onto the next talk given by Jeremy Crang on "Scotland and the Second World War, A Military History"

Andrew Hinson then gave a most amusing talk on the book "Ties of Bluid, Kin, and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora". I did purchase a copy of this book :-)

And the final talk of the day was given by John McGavin on "Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early-Modern Scotland". He is the winner of the Frank Watson Prize.

And just as we were at the close a missing award winner appeared to receive her prize from John A. Hutchinson