After the success of our North American Bicentenary Conference at Wheaton Colllege, Illinois we are now turning our attention to the sister event at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland later this year. Information will be added as it becomes available. We are hoping that on Sunday, 10th November there will also be an optional excursion to a place of MacDonald interest.

For almost two centuries, George MacDonald has delighted and challenged his readers through his short stories, novels, essays, fairy tales, poetry, and sermons. MacDonald plays with and transgresses boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastical, theology and literature, home and abroad, secular and sacred, life and death. His identity as a Scotsman in England positioned his relationships and writings between the worlds of English literature and Scottish literature.

As a champion of the arts, the musicality and visuality of his texts merged mediums and inspired new vistas. His liminality plays out through his literary interpreters and successors, in the past and in the present, within the narrow world of MacDonald studies and in the broader ways his ideas and stories shape thinking in literature and theology as well as science, theater, fine arts, history, social justice, and education.

You are invited to submit proposals for papers and panels on the theme of Borderlands for this conference marking the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth. Special consideration will be given to papers that explore liminality in George MacDonald’s writings and/or in his identity as a writer, theologian, father, friend. Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words using this form by 15th July 2024

Proposals should be submitted in MS Word or PDF as a one-page, double-spaced abstract prepared for blind review. Panel proposals should indicate the theme of the panel and include all of the proposed panel abstracts together. Accepted papers will be considered for a special edition of The Scottish Literary Review (https://asls.org.uk/).

If you are new to George MacDonald, or looking for a short overview of his life and writings (including a full Bibliography), we suggest you start with this Biographical Introduction from MacDonald scholar Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson.