The first collected edition of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, The Works of Ossian was published in two volumes in 1765. To mark the 250th anniversary of this significant cultural event and the development of a new online resource, Ossian Online, a one-day symposium and public lecture was held in the Royal Irish Academy on Friday 4 September 2015. Reflecting the diversity of Ossian’s appeal, the symposium featured speakers from a range of disciplines, presenting papers on new and recent research on Macpherson’s work. These talks presented new perspectives on familiar topics such as the role and meaning of Ireland in Ossian and Gaelic sources for the poetry, alongside considerations of the current status of Ossian studies in the academy and its potential place in public humanities. Digital humanities projects that focus on Ossian are represented by presentations on Ossian Online and on network analysis of the Ossian corpus.