The Conference and Next Steps

Morvern French
Friday 23 September 2016

Conference

As readers of this blog will know, a concluding conference for the Scotland and the Flemish People Project took place in St Andrews in mid-June. Details of the various sessions at the conference were set out in this blog series during the spring.

About 70 people attended the conference. Some were academic historians, some were local or family historians and some had a general interest in the history of the Flemish people in Scotland. Attendees came from as far away as Australia and USA. The bulk, however, were from the UK and Flanders.

The goal of the conference was to present the fruits of recent research on the topic and to provide an environment in which participants could network around particular topics of interest. Apart from the formal conference sessions there were two receptions and a dinner built into the schedule that permitted participants to exchange views.

The organisers are very grateful to the PF and Wyfold Charitable Trusts as well as the Government of Flanders for their generous support for the conference as well as the project more generally.

Next Steps

Given the breadth of the subject matter covered in the conference we have decided not to prepare a summary of its the findings at this stage. The project team has however begun work on two publications. The first will be a book of edited proceedings of the conference. This will be aimed primarily at historians. The second publication will draw more broadly on the output from the conference, the work summarised in the weekly blog over the last two years, the findings of our two PhD students, and existing literature on the topic. This book will be written for a more general audience.

We expect it will take about a year to bring these books to the point of publication.
When the publication dates have been determined these will be communicated through this blog.

Prof. Roger Mason and Dr Alex Fleming
St Andrews – September 2016