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Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net
Susan and I met Joseph Durant while visiting
the University of South Carolina a few years ago and were immediately
impressed with him. The three of us ran into each other at subsequent
meetings on the USC campus and, if possible, we formed an even more
favorable opinion of Joseph.
Ironically, we had endowed a scholarship for students at the University
of Glasgow a few years before Joseph arrived there for a study abroad
experience. When the good folks at Glasgow awarded our scholarship to
Joseph, we were pleased and happy for him, for us, and the university.
Those involved made an excellent choice.
Hopefully over the coming years the scholarship will continue to grow
and additional scholars will be selected for study. The two of us have
scholarships at several universities in the United States but could not
be prouder of the connection between the University of Glasgow and
Joseph Durant. I will never forget the day the bursar, Mr. Bruce,
visited my dorm room at North Greenville College in the mountains of
South Carolina. He had come to inform me I had been awarded a $500
scholarship for my freshman year. That amount equaled 500 hours of work
at Mr. Hull’s Esso station during high school and a thousand hours from
the work scholarship I had my freshman year at college. The many trees
on campus with their brilliant colors of red, yellow and orange seemed
to bloom a bit brighter for me over the weeks to come. Furthermore, the
dishes, pots and pans I washed in the cafeteria, the floors I mopped,
buffed, and waxed, the linen I ironed in the laundry, all at fifty cents
an hour, did not feel quite so hard to do every day for the remainder of
the year. Maybe this is what is called “paying it forward”! (FRS:
8.10.16)
Joseph Durant
University of South Carolina Scholar Studies
Abroad at the University of Glasgow
By Professor Gerard Carruthers
Sponsored by the kind generosity of Frank
and Susan Shaw and family, the Centre for Robert Burns Studies has been
home to the first ‘Shaw Scholar’ during 2015-16. The recipient of this
postgraduate package is Mr Joseph Durant (formerly an undergraduate at
the University of South Carolina in Columbia). Joseph is working on an
MPhil thesis, by research, the subject of which is the life and writings
of Robert Burns’s friend, Maria Riddell (1772-1808). Among Maria
Riddell’s publications, ripe for scholarly reassessment, are Voyage to
the Madeira and Leeward and Caribbean Isles, with Sketches of the
Natural History of these Islands (1792) and work in an edited volume,
The Metrical Miscellany, consisting chiefly of poems hitherto
unpublished (1802). Joseph is also working with a number of unpublished
letters and a commonplace book by Maria Riddell
Frank Shaw is himself known to many Burnsians as a long time member of
the Burns Club of Atlanta and for his excellent website, Robert Burns
Lives! This article is slated to appear in the 2017 annual Robert Burns
Chronicle and our thanks and appreciation go to Bill Dawson, Editor, for
allowing this notice to be published in Robert Burns Lives!
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