Jenni Calder at 9th Annual Scott Conference
Channel: Wyoming Videos
Date: 2011-07-15

The Ninth International Scott Conference, Walter Scott: Sheriff and Outlaw, was held July 5-9, 2011 at University of Wyoming. Jenni Calder delivered the plenary talk, "Sir Walter Scott goes West: Scott's Frontier Legacy".  The event was sponsored by University of Wyoming and the Wyoming Humanities Council.
In writing about the Scottish Highlands, Walter Scott took his readers on journeys into frontier country where they encountered fiercely proud natives who passionately defended a way of life that was under threat. The paradigm was readily translated to the American West. In my talk I plan to explore the way Scott offered a narrative of life and landscape that fitted frontier experience in the US and influenced a heroic interpretation of discovery and settlement alongside the loss of the very features that bred its mythic possibilities.
Jenni Calder was Head of Publications for the National Museum of Scotland, and is currently President of Scottish PEN. Listing herself as a "Poet, writer," for the Scottish Book Trust, she can be more fully appreciated as the author of: There Has to be a Lone Ranger: The Myth and Reality of the American Wild West; Scots in the USA; Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study; The Enterprising Scot (ed.); Chronicles of Conscience; the poem cycle Smoke, considering the Holocaust; and the autobiography Not Nebuchadnezzar, which treats her complex identities as the Scottish, American, and Jewish child of a famous family.

Scott was a lawyer, friend to the great, and literary authority, yet he became so by breaking all the rules. Walter Scott: Sheriff and Outlaw promoted new understanding of Scott's innovations, and his contribution to literary and other fields up to the present day.

The conference offered sessions, plenaries, workshops, roundtables, advice from journal editors, and a trip to see the West Walter Scott  made. It concided with the rodeo and festivities of Laramie's Jubilee Days.

Video shot and edited by UW Television 
Cameron Patey, camera/editing 
Ali Grossman, producer/graphics

copyright 2011 University of Wyoming