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Biography
After a state-school education in North East Fife, I took my MA in Humanity and Scottish Literature, at the University of Glasgow (1992), where I was the first person to graduate with this particular combination. I then moved to Balliol College, Oxford, where I held a Snell Exhibition, to undertake my DPhil in English, on the Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece under the supervision of Professor Sally Mapstone. After graduation there, I undertook several temporary contracts at the Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow before being appointed at University of Nottingham in 2001.
I completed my PGCHE at the University of Glasgow in 2001, and I was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in 2014. Although my current role has taken me away from timetabled teaching, I have continued with research supervision and I maintain an interest in classroom delivery; as a result of my role as school governor, I am particularly interested in transition between school and university.
I have published widely on the literatures of Scotland, in Scots, English and Latin, written between about 1350 and 1630. I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Mid-Career Fellow September 2013 to August 2015, for a project on Gavin Douglas and a British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow in 2020 for a project on early Scottish humanism,
I was appointed professor of Older Scots Literature in 2019. Since January 2021, I have been Director of Midlands4Cities, an AHRC-funded doctoral training programme, run from UoN in partnership with Birmingham City University, Coventry University, De Montfort University, Nottingham Trent and the Universities of Birmingham, Leicester and Warwick. This continues to be an amazing experience, as I get to meet students researching across the full range of arts and humanities disciplines and see best practice across some excellent universities.
I am president of the Scottish Text Society, and oversee the production of scholarly editions of Older Scots texts. I am also chair of the editorial board of Nottingham Medieval Studies.
Expertise Summary
My research specialisms are Older Scots literature and late medieval and early modern Scottish Latin literature, and my publications have all been in that area, although they have addressed texts written in the fourteenth century as well as texts written in the seventeenth. I also maintain an interest in more recent Scottish literature, through the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Like nearly all specialists in Scottish literature, I am also expert in English literature, especially that of the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; and I have an deep interest in the patterns of the Northern Renaissance and European humanism.
My particular areas of interest include the representations of kingship, government and national identity; the use of Arthurian narrative; and humanism, classical reception and translation and the impact of print. I am also interested in theories and practices of editing, and the most effective methods of enabling access to difficult textual material.
Outreach and public engagement
Since my appointment at Nottingham, I have organised a number of public events relating to medieval studies generally (including Robin Hood and the value of medieval studies), and connected directly to my research area (a weekend event tied into the National Theatre of Scotland's tour of the James Plays (2016)). I have appeared on television and radio, to talk about the Douglases and Robert Burns, and I have completed a commission by Historic Environment Scotland to contextualise a 13th C poem describing a siege of Caerlaverock Castle.
As Scottish Text Society president, I have also been involved in a number of public events, only in Scotland rather than in Nottingham. These have included book launches at Darnaway Castle in Moray, and providing scholarly advice for a children's book derived from an Older Scots poem, 'The Buke of the Howlat' and organising the Angus McIntosh Lectures in Edinburgh, public lectures on aspects of Scottish literature and language.
Teaching Summary
My teaching expertise lies primarily in literature written between about 1350 and 1625, approximately Chaucer to Spenser, and I have taught this material from first year undergraduate all the way… read more
Research Summary
I am currently working on a project, originally funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, considering the reception and transmission of humanism across three… read more
Recent Publications
2018. International Companion to Scottish Literature, 1400-1650 Association of Scottish Literary Studies.
NICOLA ROYAN, 2017. Medieval Scottish Poetry. In: Oxford Bibliographies: British and Irish Literature Oxford University Press USA. (In Press.)
NICOLA ROYAN, 2017. The Noble Identity of Gavin Douglas. In: JOANNA MARTIN, ed., Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance 1420-1587 Oxford University Press. 127-43
NICOLA ROYAN, 2016. Gavin Douglas's Eneados. In: RITA COPELAND, ed., Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: volume 1: 800-1558 1. Oxford University Press. 561-82
Older Scots and Scottish Latin literature, but also Scottish literature right up to the present day; late medieval and early modern English literature (from about 1375 to 1625). I have interests in the M4C strands of translation, and conflict and societal change, and in textual criticism and editing, medieval and early modern literature, and book history. My research interests fall under the Centre for Regional Literatures and Cultures.
Current and recent doctoral students are working on:
- the representation of Scottish and Irish identities in 17th Century Scotland and Ireland
- post war translations of the Aeneid
- court poetry around the Union of the Crowns
My teaching expertise lies primarily in literature written between about 1350 and 1625, approximately Chaucer to Spenser, and I have taught this material from first year undergraduate all the way through to postgraduate level. I am always willing to consider teaching outwith my research area, including into the twenty-first century, as I find that an exhilarating challenge, to engage with a different area.
My current role does not allow time for classroom teaching, but I still supervise post-graduate research students, and I would be happy to discuss new PGR projects in medieval and early modern literature, and Scottish literature from late medieval to contemporary.
I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and I have served as an assessor and a chair for the Nottingham Recognition Scheme panels.
Current Research
I am currently working on a project, originally funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, considering the reception and transmission of humanism across three generations of writers in both Scots and Latin, c. 1480-c. 1550. It begins with men active during the reign of James III (1480-88), Archibald Whitelaw, William Elphinstone, John Ireland and Robert Henryson, looking at both their surviving work and the material evidence of their reading. The middle section is concerned with writers active in the reign of James IV (1488-1513) and in his son's (James V) minority, (1513-1528). These include Gavin Douglas, a focus of my previous research, and Hector Boece and John Mair. Boece and Mair were educated together in Paris; Douglas and Mair knew each other well, both through their common locality in east Lothian and most probably through coincident time spent in Paris. Their engagements with humanist practices are different, in language choice, in generic patterns and in scholarly positions. Nevertheless, their work and their reputations demonstrate deep commitment to current scholarship and a determination to use it to the benefit of their home country. The final section deals with writers of the reign of James V (1528-1542) and his daughter's Mary's minority (1542-1562). These include John Bellenden and William Stewart, both translators of Boece's Scotorum Historia, and, in Bellenden's case, Livy. Like Robert Henryson in the first section, Sir David Lyndsay's writings do not position themselves overtly as humanist texts, but both Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and A Dialog between Experience and a Courtier demonstrate knowledge of some humanist concerns. These texts therefore serve as an indication of the depth of humanist reception in Scotland by the mid-sixteenth century.
At its broadest, my research always questions common British models of periodisation, specifically the divide between medieval and early modern (largely derived from English political history), and asks whether they represent the changes in intellectual culture; it also questions consistently narratives of literary culture originating in south-east England, around the capital and the older universities. It seeks to demonstrate the porous nature of Scottish culture, its openness to mainland Europe as well as to its southerly neighbour, and to consider the ways in which narratives of national identity are bound up with literary and cultural self-representation.
Past Research
My previous research has been diverse in its range and focus: I have written on Barbour's Bruce and Hary's Wallace, Scottish historiography from Walter Bower to John Bellenden, and the poetry of the court of James VI. I have enjoyed working on edited collections such as the International Companion on Scottish Literature, 1400-1650 and The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, among others, and also synthesising current scholarship for the Oxford Bibliography entry on Medieval Scots Poetry.
Future Research
My primary interests will probably always lie around the turn of the sixteenth century, and I expect to be engaged with Scottish humanism for some time to come. I have hopes of writing about the novels of Catherine Carswell, and Rona Munro's James Plays, but that might be some way off.