Members

Murray Pittock is co-Chair of SAHA and Bradley Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he has served in senior leadership roles since 2008. He is currently Pro Vice-Principal, with responsibilities ranging from directing early career development for over 500 academic staff in Glasgow, Dumfries, China and Singapore, to external partnerships with a particular focus on the Glasgow Riverside Innovation District . He leads the Kelvin Hall development for the University as well as chairing its Advanced Research Centre XR Strategy Board. Murray is a Trustee (Research and Education) and Scottish History advisor to the National Trust for Scotland and an advisor to many other organizations. His recent funded research includes the £1M Allan Ramsay and the Enlightenment Project, a Scottish Government report on the impact of Burns on the Scottish Economy, and an urban history consultancy with Barclays Bank. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, New York University, Notre Dame, Trinity College, Dublin, Charles University, Prague, South Carolina and other institutions. Murray has made around 2000 media appearances in 55 countries on culture, politics, history and society. His Global History of Scotland is due out in 2022 from Yale. In 2020, he became the first person elected to Academia Europaea for research on Scottish studies.

Catherine O’Leary is Professor of Spanish and Dean of Arts and Divinity at the University of St Andrews. She has published widely on contemporary Spanish literature, and has particular interests in theatre censorship, gender and identity, and exile and cultural memory. She is Director of the St Andrews interdisciplinary Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute (CIMS). A graduate of Dublin City University and University College Dublin, she worked at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, before moving to Scotland in 2013.

Andrew Dilley is Senior Lecturer and Dean for Academic Research Partnerships & Research Governance at the University of Aberdeen. Before that he was Head of Discipline for History (2015-2017) and then Director of Research for the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy and Art History (2018-2022).

Andrew read for a BA in Modern History (1997 – 2000) and an M.St in Historical Research, both at Wadham College, Oxford. He stayed at Oxford for his doctorate, finishing his graduate studies in 2006. Prior to joining the University of Aberdeen in 2008, Andrew lectured for two years in Imperial and Commonwealth History at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the RHS and HEA.

Andrew’s research and teaching interests are focused on the history of the British empire and particularly the economics, politics, and culture of from the 1880s to the 1970s.His early work and first monograph focused on finance and empire, and he has moved to examine economic relations more broadly  through the lens of business associations. From 2015 to 2017 he held an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for a research project on ‘Commerce and the Commonwealth: Business Associations, Economic Governance, and Political Culture in the Empire-Commonwealth, 1886-1975’.

Dr Murray Frame is Reader in History, School of Humanities, Social Sciences & Law, University of Dundee.  Murray is a historian of modern Russia, with a broad interest in the relationship between culture and power. His early research focused on the history of Russian theatre in the context of the evolution of civil society. While continuing to work on aspects of this theme, Murray also developed a project on the history of civilian policing during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, which is nearing completion.

Dr Ben Fletcher-Watson manages the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees from the University of St Andrews and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His research interests include theatre for babies and the relaxed performance movement. Recent publications: Humanities of the Future (IASH 2020), The Art of Being Dangerous (Leuven University Press 2021) and Dangerous Women (Unbound 2022).

Jo Gill is Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Arts, and Professor of Twentieth-Century and American Literature. She joined the University of Glasgow in August 2022 from the University of Exeter where she served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the College of Humanities. She previously held the roles of Associate Dean for Education (2018-19) and Associate Dean for International and Development (2016-18).

Jo was educated at a comprehensive school in the north-west of England and took her BA at Leicester and her MA at York. She then worked in newspapers, publishing and the charity sector prior to returning to academia and taking her PhD at the University of Gloucestershire (2001).

Jo’s research and teaching interests include modern American poetry and the literature and culture of cities and suburbs. She is the author of numerous books and articles including Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics (2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008) and The Poetics of the American Suburbs (2013). Her latest book, which was completed with the support of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, is Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms (OUP, forthcoming).

Jo served for six years as Governor, and then Chair of Governors, at Richard Huish Sixth Form College, Somerset. She is former secretary to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and was the inaugural co-chair of the BAAS/US Embassy Grants Programme. She has previously served as a trustee of the Exeter Northcott Theatre and currently sits on the Advisory Board of the “93% Club.”

Tanja Bueltmann is Professor of History and holds a Chair in International History at the University of Strathclyde. She specialises in migration and diaspora history and her main research interest is in immigrant community life, especially ethnic associational culture and its diverse roles. She has published widely on the topic, including her award-winning monograph Clubbing Together, which was named the Saltire Society Research Book of the Year 2015. In her current research, Tanja examines the role of immigrant associations in shaping the collective actions and identity of Europeans in the UK, taking a longitudinal perspective from c1850 to the present.

Professor Donna Heddle is Director of the UHI Institute for Northern Studies. She has won awards for course development and design. Her research interests are Scottish and Northern Isles cultural history, Renaissance language and literature, and cultural tourism. She has led and is currently leading several national and international research and training projects involving cultural tourism, including a project in Vanuatu. Donna led the very successful 2008, 2014 and 2021 Research Excellence Framework submissions from UHI in Area Studies, which in 2021 came 1st in Scotland overall and 1st equal in the UK for research impact. She was awarded a Personal Chair by UHI in June 2013 and was Chair of the UHI Tourism Group from 2017 to 2022.

Prof. Heddle’s main research interests are the creation of new paradigms in Scottish and Northern Isles studies, small island studies, Scottish language and literature in a European context, and Scottish cultural history. She is the author of a number of publications in these areas and is currently leading several national and international research and cultural tourism projects involving the North Atlantic rim and the South Pacific. She is at present working on Scots-Nordic balladic synergies; the underpinning philosophy of Northern Studies; the Huguenot influence of Du Bartas on the poetry of the Scots Court under James VI; aspects of cultural tourism, and geophysical and metaphysical correlations in historical depictions of Orkney. She is also working on a history of Highlands and Islands literature. She is particularly passionate about locative research – in the communities, by the communities, for the communities.

Professor Jemina Napier started her career as a sign language interpreter practitioner, educator and researcher, and she has been Chair of Intercultural Communication in the Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University (HWU) since 2013. She served as Head of the Department of LINCS from 2014-2018, as Director of the Centre for Translation & Interpreting Studies in Scotland (CTISS) from 2018-2021, and Director of Research for the School of Social Sciences from 2019-2022. Since November 2022 she has been in the newly created role of Associate Principal of Research Culture & People for HWU. She is an elected Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Fellow of the Association of Sign Language Interpreters UK, an Adjunct Professor in the Dept of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College Dublin. As well as her involvement in SAHA, she sits on several boards and strategic advisory groups to represent HWU, including the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, the Scottish Universities Insight Institute, the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, the British Academy-University Council of Modern Languages strategic committee for languages in higher education, the Scottish Government BSL Justice Advisory Group and the UK Government’s Ministry of Justice Visual and Tactile Communication Services Pipeline Strategic Group. Prof Napier’s research expertise concentrates around sign languages, linguistic access, interpreting and translation, linguistic and cultural diversity, linguistic and social inclusion, mediated communication, intercultural communication, and multilingualism. In her research leadership roles, she actively campaigns for, and creates wherever possible, equity in access to opportunity and capability building for academics and PhD students from minoritised and disadvantaged groups, and for women.  

Dr Lesley-Ann Dickson is Associate Head of the Division of Media, Communication and Performing Arts at Queen Margaret University. She has worked across the arts and culture sectors as an arts administrator, book publisher, marketer and creative entrepreneur. Her research interests are primarily focused on cultural exhibition, reception and participation, with a special interest in cinema and film festivals. Her view is that knowledge is always rooted in collaboration. Her work regularly connects industry and academia through knowledge exchange, consultancy, collaborative projects, industry-informed curriculum design in order to produce work that has both intellectual value and industry usefulness.

Dr. Jon Blackwood is a Reader in Contemporary Art & Research Lead at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. A curator, educator & writer, his work focuses on the intersections between contemporary art, activism and politics in the post-socialist world. He has written extensively on contemporary art in the former Yugoslav countries, particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina and North Macedonia. He is currently working on a history of Macedonian video art, and an exhibition of Bosnian futurisms.

Professor Stephen Broad is an islander in exile, researcher, teacher, community conductor and occasional broadcaster. He studied at the University of Glasgow, where he won prizes in music and physics and undertook a DPhil in Historical Musicology at Worcester College, Oxford. He is Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Stephen’s research interests span a number of fields, centred around three broad themes: the philosophy of practice (processes of practice and artistic research); historical musicology (especially Olivier Messiaen); and music education. He has undertaken a range of applied research to support policy development in the arts and education, and supervises a number of doctoral students pursuing research and artistic doctorates.

Claire Squires is Director of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH), and Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, following a previous career in publishing. In her role at SGSAH, she oversees Scotland-wide doctoral training and development in the Arts & Humanities. Her research focuses on book cultures and the contemporary publishing industry, frequently working in partnership with external organisations such as Publishing Scotland, Scottish Book Trust and the Saltire Society. With her research partner Beth Driscoll, she is founder of Ullapoolism, a conceptual school that foregrounds playful, material, and arts-informed thinking and activism.

Kerstin Stutterheim, DPhil, is professor in creative practice and director of research at the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University, and visiting professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Bournemouth University. Before, she was the Rektor (principal) of the Academy of Media Arts KHM Cologne, and Professor for dramaturgy and Aesthetics of audio-visual media at Film University Babelsberg ‘Konrad Wolf’. She has been a professor for about 22 years in the areas of Art and Humanities and is a filmmaker and dramaturg since 1990, member of the German Film Academy. She teaches across the disciplines, from aesthetics and design to film studies, screenwriting and directing.

She has published widely on dramaturgy and aesthetics, forms of representation, with a focus on anti-Semitism in film and media, as well as on film and cultural studies. One of her monographs is ‘Modern Film Dramaturgy – An Introduction’, published with Peter Lang in 2019, her most recent documentary Parallel Lines, together with Stephanie Farmer, for Red Balloon/Bournemouth University (UK 2019), about British paralympic athletes and their representation.

The Faculty of Philosophy of the Humboldt University of Berlin, in cooperation with the Centre for Anti-Semitism Research of the Technical University of Berlin, awarded her with a Doctor Philosophae (Dr. phil.) in 1999

Jason König is Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, and co-director of the St Andrews Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies. He works broadly on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman empire (from the late Hellenistic period to late antiquity, approx. 200 BCE – 500 CE), and on the history and representation of human-environment relations in classical antiquity. His books include The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Nick Higgins is the Director of the Creative Media Academy and Professor of Media Practice at the University of the West of Scotland.  He joined UWS in September 2013 from the University of Edinburgh where he established the MSc in Media, Culture and Society and the PhD in Transdisciplinary Documentary Film Research programmes. He is the Research Lead for Arts and Media in the School of Business and Creative Industries and represents UWS on the board of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

Nick originally studied Philosophy and International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, undertaking fieldwork in East Africa for his dissertation that was later published. He followed this with doctoral research at the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of Kent that involved extended periods of fieldwork in Mexico with the support of grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. This experience of fieldwork led towards Nick’s interest in how non-fiction filmmaking techniques could become a method for conducting research. This interest was further nurtured over a period of several years in the early 2000s when Nick attended the MEDIA funded Eurodoc and Archidoc documentary filmmaking workshops, including a period at the French National Film School, La Femis, where he studied with Patricio Guzman, Harun Farocki and Peter Forgacs.

Since that time, Nick has produced 4 award winning feature documentaries and several short documentaries, receiving a BAFTA Scotland nomination for the mass-participatory documentary project, We Are Northern Lights and the BACC/SIGNIS Best Human Rights Film award for A Massacre Foretold.  His interest in the impact of non-fiction narratives has resulted in experiments with both production and distribution models, leading to collaborations with the Scottish Mental Health Foundation, the Black and Ethnic Minorities Infrastructure for Scotland (BEMIS), UNICEF and UNESCO. In 2017 he launched UWS Immersive, a multi-disciplinary research group that focuses on immersive virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies (XR). Since its inception, the group has delivered 3 international research symposia and public engagements events including the curation and exhibition of the Immersive Virtual Reality programme at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (2017 & 2019). Nick is founder and programme leader of the Masters in Filmmaking degree delivered from Film City in Glasgow’s media quarter.

Professor John Connolly is Professor of Public Policy and Head of Department of Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University and Chief Editorial Adviser for Routledge Open Research. Before entering academia, he was an in-house Evaluation Specialist for the NHS in Scotland. He undertakes interdisciplinary evaluation research into public sector reform, policy analysis, multi-level governance, crisis management and health security governance. He currently a co-Investigator on the Advanced Metagenomics, Sensors and Photocatalysis for Antimicrobial Resistance Elimination study funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. His PhD won the Sir Walter Bagehot prize for its contribution to British public administration research.