Andrew Monnickendam is Emeritus Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research concentrates on several interconnected areas. The first is the early historical novel, specifically the fiction published in Scotland in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on Walter Scott and the Waverley novels. From that point of departure, he has researched extensively on a similar but often underestimated genre, the National Tale. This led him to examine the work of Christian Isobel Johnstone, a contemporary of Scott who also wrote historical fiction—most notably the four-volume Clan-Albin (1815)—from a slightly different angle: a more rigorous approach to Highland life, an exploration of conflict in a broader European context, and a more overtly pacifist perspective. He prepared the first modern edition of Johnstone’s novel.

Because historical fiction is deeply concerned with national identity and the processes of nation-building (or nation-destruction)—and because wars and their outcomes often decide the fate of the state—Professor Monnickendam has also turned his attention to more recent accounts of conflict and to the ways in which conflict extends into periods of peace and into wider culture, as Clausewitz famously anticipated.

Selected publications:

  • 2024 “Running into Memories in the Work of Viet Thanh Nguyen.” “When Men Are Unprepared and Look Not for It”: In Memoriam Christoph Houswitschka, edited by Susan Brähler and Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, University of Bamberg Press, pp. 441–454. Bamberg FIS Repository.
  • 2016 “The Trope of War in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song.” Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War: That Better Whiles May Follow Worse, edited by David Owen and M. Cristina Pividori, Brill | Rodopi, pp. 81–90.
  • 2013. The Novels of Walter Scott and His Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • 2011 “The Scottish National Tale.” The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, edited by Murray Pittock, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 100–111.
  • 2007 Usandizaga, Aránzazu, and Andrew Monnickendam, editors. Back to Peace: Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period. University of Notre Dame Press. Choice Outstanding Academic Publication.
  • 2003 (Edition, Introduction and Notes) Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Clan Albin. Association for Scottish Literary Studies.