Professor Leith Davis has been recognized with a prestigious award for her outstanding contributions to 18th-century Scottish Studies over the course of her career.

Since its inception in 1987, the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) has only presented this award 18 times, with Davis being only the fourth female recipient. 

“I'm very honoured to be recognized with this award from an international organization that has been so important to me throughout my career,” says Davis.

She was presented with the award at the ECSSS’ annual conference, held in Stirling, Scotland by professor Michael Brown, Co-Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

In his remarks, Brown praised Davis’ body of work, highlighting her first book, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830 (1998) and her most recent books, Jacobitism and Cultural Memory, 1688-1830 and Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present (co-edited by Kevin J. James), published earlier this year.

“Her work has frequently moved beyond the confines of the stock materials of literary critics—novels, poems and plays—or the manuscript deposits and bureaucratic records beloved of historians—to take in oral accounts, music and song,” says Brown.

He also commended Davis’s “remarkable” Digital Humanities project on "The Lyon in Mourning" manuscript by Robert Forbes, applauding her efforts to remediate “the discourses of the Jacobite world for our own media saturated age.”