Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: A Symposium

Join us as we celebrate Robert Louis Stevenson Day 2024 with an academic symposium reflecting on Stevenson’s Pacific writing, travels, and cross-cultural friendships. The symposium brings together academics and creative practitioners to engage in interdisciplinary conversations, as well as to participate in a programme that ranges across studies of adaptation, museums, literature, documentary film, and environmental humanities.

The programme features Stevenson scholars, graphic artists, documentary filmmakers and poets. Together, they will explore Stevenson's legacy across Scotland, Sāmoa and Hawai‘i, all within the context of the AHRC-funded ‘Remediating Stevenson’ project, for which this symposium was commissioned.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the 'Remediating Stevenson' research project explores the relevance of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific fiction to contemporary communities in Scotland, Sāmoa and Hawai'i. The project will do so through arts education workshops; newly commissioned graphic adaptations and poetry; a documentary film; and exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and the National Library of Scotland.

Over the course of the three-year project (2022 to 2025), a research team from the Universities of Edinburgh and Chester, in partnership with an international team of creative practitioners and stakeholders, will explore the legacies of Stevenson's Pacific writing, specifically the three short stories published in his 1893 collection Island Nights' Entertainments.

In addition to producing new creative works by project artists, poets and film-makers, the 'Remediating Stevenson' team is working in partnership with educators, non-profit organisations, artists and writers on a multimodal programme of community-based participatory research in Scotland, Sāmoa and Hawai'i.

The project’s Principal Investigator is Professor Michelle Keown of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, working alongside Dr Shari Sabeti (Moray House School of Education and Sport) and Dr Simon Grennan (University of Chester).

Host or Publisher School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures