The Scottish Institute for Northern Renaissance Studies (SINRS) is an umbrella organisation based in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling and formally linked with the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde but also involving the participation of colleagues from other Scottish universities. The aim of SINRS is to foster interdisciplinary teaching and research in the broad field of Renaissance Studies.
SINRS is designed to exploit the unrivalled personal and institutional resources that Central Scotland has to offer in this major field of academic study. These include the internationally acknowledged expertise of colleagues in the universities of Central Scotland in such areas as Shakespeare Studies, Linguistics and Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Nationalism and Republicanism, Gender, The Body, Sexuality, Scottish Humanism, Renaissance Narrative Fiction and Drama, and Material and Intellectual Cultures of the Renaissance. The National Library of Scotland collections, the libraries of the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling and Strathclyde and the Leighton Library (Stirling), along with the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh) and the Burrell Collection (Glasgow) have exceptionally rich holdings in the early modern period. In addition, the Institute provides a focal point for a variety of research projects and collaborative activities involving academic institutions across Scotland, including seminar series and symposia.
SINRS acknowledges the southern European derivation of our inherited paradigms, but owing to its Scottish location, it also approaches Renaissance Culture from a distinctive intellectual and geopolitical perspective. One of its many objectives is to investigate the unique contribution made by cultural productions of Northern Europe, including Scotland, to our conceptualisation of the Renaissance.
The Journal of the Northern Renaissance is a key venue for such research. The official journal of SINRS is dedicated to the study of early modern Northern European cultural production.