Dr Ainsley McIntosh is the first AHRC-Daphne Jackson Fellow in Arts and Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, she has held Research Fellowships at the Walter Scott Research Centre, University of Aberdeen. Her critical edition of Scott’s Marmion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) was the first of ten volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry (EEWSP). She works on nineteenth-century women’s writing, and in particular seeks to disrupt established critical narratives surrounding their contribution to literary culture. Her current project explores nineteenth-century Scottish manuscript culture, with a specific focus on the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has a particular interest in ideas relating to literary manuscript culture, social authorship, and the interplay between textual and cultural legacies.
I am currently exploring how writers and artists of the Romantic period bear witness to the ecological and anthropological cost of the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to ideas relating to trauma, pain and disability studies, I am interested in the politics of commemoration and regeneration.
My second area of research focuses on the textual and cultural legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry. I am currently exploring ideas relating to identity and canonicity via the lens of literary, cultural and bodily fragmentation.