Full Name Susan Valentine Died 15 January 2013 | Nationality Scottish | |
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Occupation Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, Edinburgh Known for Work on Scottish Enlightenment, Character and Emotions Discipline English literature, Scottish Studies Books Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700-1900 | ||
Susan Manning (Professor) (24 December 1953 – 15 January 2013) was a Scottish academic born in Glasgow, Scotland. She specialized in Scottish studies and English literature. Before her untimely death in 2013 at the age of 59, she was the Grierson Professor in English literature in the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH), an institute at the University of Edinburgh. Prof. Manning's work on Scottish Enlightenment and transatlantic literature led to international acclaim. Due to her academic expertise, Susan was made a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, Edinburgh. After completing her Bachelor of Arts at Newnham College, University of Cambridge in 1976, Prof. Manning went on to complete her doctorate under the supervision of Prof. David Levin, a literary scholar and the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Viriginia, USA.
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Education
Susan was born in Glasgow to James Valentine (physicist) and Honora who was a gradate in Philosophy. She joined the John Mason High School in Abingdon, Oxford when her family moved there in 1962. She was moved to Dunmore Primary where she met Jill Hanna and became good friends and intellectual rivals, as Jill described in her tribute to Susan in 2013, "[W]e were rivals from the start, although the rivalry was simply a spur so that we both produced our individual best. Susan did not need a rival as she was always competing with herself".
She earned her bachelor's degree at Newnham College, University of Cambridge and graduated in 1976. It was at Cambridge that she met her future husband, physicist Howard Manning and got married.
Susan went on to do her doctoral studies at the University of Virginia under Prof. David Levin. She was equally attracted towards studying Scottish and American literature and the overlap between the two. Her main mode of inquiry involved discovering similarities between Scottish and American literary style, subjects and preoccupations, distinguishing these from English literature. This quest took the shape of defining what provincialism meant and its relation to any 'Centre'.
Professional Contribution
While completing her PhD, which took around ten years. Susan would often joke that it had taken three children Laura, Lindsay and Sophie. She took up a research fellowship in the Newnham College in 1981 where she went on to become a lecturer in 1984.
Her interest in Scottish literature resulted in her first major publication, The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century, issued in 1990 by Cambridge University Press. In Cambridge, she created and taught the American literature course which became very popular among students[5].