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.

With an academic background, Cristina is currently a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s policy team. She provides support for the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance on policy and communications activities. Cristina has a PhD in Heritage Studies from Heriot-Watt University and has conducted research on festivals and cultural/heritage diplomacy in two EU-funded Horizon 2020 projects: CoHERE (Critical Heritages of Europe) and ECHOES (European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities). She is the co-editor of Heritage and Festivals in Europe: Performing Identities (Routledge, 2019). She sits on the board for the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and is a committee member of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Network in the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

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.

Dr Brian Boag studied Modern and Scottish History at Glasgow and having qualified as a schoolteacher diversified into the Social Sciences and went into the world of Further Education.  He has tutored Social Sciences for the Open University for many years and when the proposals for a University of the Highlands and Islands took shape he got involved in that historic development.  Brian was the first programme leader for the Social Sciences programme and went on to become subject network leader for the Humanities, Education and Gaelic and later Dean of Arts, Humanities and Business.  He has always been interested in opening up educational opportunity at all levels for people in the highlands and islands and in other rural parts of the country.

Ullrich Kockel is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences, Heriot-Watt University. His research includes intangible cultural heritage with focus on sustainable communities, place-making and displacement, human ecology, counter-cultural movements, and philosophical anthropology. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Rīga, and at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas/Lithuania, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

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.

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).