Our Projects Our Awards Scotland's National Book Awards 2018: Research Shortlist Awardee Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History, (Princeton University Press). This book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Mole provides a new reception history of renowned Romantic writers and attends to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated writers amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Shortlistees John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and María A. Vélez-Serna, Early Cinema in Scotland, (Edinburgh University Press) Focusing on the social experience of cinema and cinema-going, this collection of essays explore early cinema in Scotland, from its inception in 1896 until the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It also examines the attempts to establish a feature film production sector and the significance of an imaginary version of Scotland in international cinema. Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd, Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts, (Oxford University Press) An original study of ideas of union within the Scottish literary tradition from the early modern period to the present. With new readings of canonical Scottish and English literature, this book features some of today's leading literary scholars and historians of Britain and re-examines historic assumptions about national identity. Angela McCarthy and Sir Tom Devine, Tea and Empire: James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon, (Manchester University Press) This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, 'father of the Ceylon tea enterprise' in the nineteenth century. Publicly celebrated in Sri Lanka for his efforts in transforming the country's economy and shaping the world's drinking habits, Taylor died in disgrace and remains unknown in his native Scotland. Ronald Lyndsay Crawford, The Chair of Verity : Political preaching and pulpit censure in eighteenth-century Scotland (Humming Earth) This book is the first major study of the phenomenon of political preaching in Scotland during the age of Enlightenment.