Alisha Palmer | Modernism
Alisha is a final year PhD researcher and Teaching Assistant at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis explores the aesthetics and politics of abortion in early twentieth century literature, with a specific focus on modernism. She has taught and graded on modules with focusses on close reading and literary and historical context on literature from 1380 to the present. Her research interests include literary modernism, queer theory, and theoretical approaches to the body.
Claudia Sterbini | Modernism
Claudia Sterbini is a third-year PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Her research uses medical humanities methods to explore how asexuality was conceptualised in medicine and literature at the turn of the 20th century. She taught Undergraduate courses on the history of English literature from 1380 to the present at the University of Edinburgh, and Postgraduate courses on the construction of narratives in medical writing for Edinburgh Futures Institute. In 2025 she was longlisted for the Edinburgh Teaching Award. Her research interests include queer theory, literary modernism, and the medical humanities.
Anna Ball | Creative Writing
Anna is a poet and a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews, under the supervision of Karen Solie. She holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, where she was awarded the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, where she served as the Walter and Nancy Kidd Graduate Teaching Fellow in poetry.
She is working on her first collection, poems emerging from encounters with the sublime in youth and young adulthood that remain unresolved. Her creative preoccupations include the evolution of traditional literary genres, the interplay of lyric and narrative (or song and storytelling) in literary expression, and modes of contemplation embodied in inherited poetic forms. In her critical thesis, she is investigating the intersection of metonymic figuration, feminist perspectives on the sublime, and artistic approaches to inconsolable experience in contemporary poetry.
Anna is also interested in theories of pedagogy and committed to scholarship of best practices in teaching the language arts. She has taught modules in creative writing, literature, the humanities, argumentative writing, and English as a foreign language. She intends for her teaching and her practice-led research to celebrate language as an enigmatic medium of art and to demonstrate how literature can illuminate both writer’s and reader’s dynamic relationship with the figures that surround us.
Dr Miriam Huxley | Creative Writing
Miriam Huxley is a writer and editor from British Columbia. She has a PhD and MSc in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh, as well as an MFA from the University of British Columbia. She has taught Scottish Literature and Creative Writing in Canada and Scotland. She was the 2018 winner of the Sloan Prize for prose in Lowland Scots vernacular and has been published in Hillfire Press Edinburgh, The London Reader, From Arthur’s Seat, HARTS & Minds, and Louden Singletree. Her research interests include Canadian Literature, Scottish Literature, the Gothic, horror, literary fiction, speculative fiction, narrative nonfiction, ecocriticism, and inclusive feminism.
Sadbh Kellett | Creative Writing
Sadbh Kellett is an Irish author and academic. She recently completed a PhD exploring the relationship between Gaelic mythology and acts of nation-building in modern Irish and Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews. She is particularly interested in the reception of Gaelic mythology and the recovery of lesser-known mythographic works, including texts in the Irish-language. Kellett’s novel Hunt the Hare was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction’s Discoveries Prize in 2022. She is represented by Sabhbh Curran at Curtis Brown.
Dr Laura Muetzelfeldt | Creative Writing
Laura Muetzelfeldt (pronouns: she/her) is a writer from Glasgow who has been published in journals such as The International Literary Quarterly and short story collections like New Writing Scotland. She was awarded third place in the Scottish Arts Trust’s Flash Fiction Award and second place in the Federation of Writer’s Scotland Vernal Equinox Competition.
Laura completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews in 2023; John Burnside was her supervisor. Her thesis included the novel, We Carry the Light, and an exploration of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on writers’ creativity. She has been lucky enough to have been involved in several creative collaborations at St Andrews; most recently, she collaborated with an astrophysicist to write a short story inspired by his research on gravitational microlensing. This was published in the collection, Around Distant Suns.
Laura Scott | Contemporary Literature
Laura (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in English and Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research investigates the role of heterotopia in imagining civically national and democratically pluralist futures in Scottish x African women’s novels. During her time at Glasgow, she has been on the organising board for two decolonial conferences; Moving the Centre in 2021 and Postcolonial Faultlines in 2022. She has given talks on her research at the Transatlantic Literary Women’s society, based at Glasgow, and at the Midwest Pop Culture Association’s annual conference at DePaul University in Chicago. Her upcoming projects include a review of Jackie Kay’s most recent collection, May Day.
Isabella Shields | Contemporary Literature
Isabella Shields is a writer and curator from Glasgow. She is a final year doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has taught courses on a wide range of literature there and at Edinburgh Napier University since 2021. Her work focuses on feminism and poststructuralism in literature, art, and film, and her PhD thesis, ‘The Brutality of Fact: Contemporary Women’s Life-Writing and the Culture Wars’, has been recommended for publication following entry to the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 2022. She has been an arts and culture correspondent for BBC Radio Scotland since 2021. She has acted as a panellist for the James Tait Black Award for Biography from 2021-2024.
Alice Gibson | Scottish Literature
Alice Gibson is a PhD researcher with cross supervision between the University of Glasgow and the University of St Andrews. Her research focusses on medieval Scottish literature from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and considers the ways in which diverse communities of readers maintained an active and engaged literary culture, shaping texts and thus inflecting the production of what may now be considered the origins of Scottish Literature. Her research is motivated by a passion for discovering and communicating more about the people who read and popularised texts which have survived for over five hundred years, and which still provoke discussion and consideration today. During her time at Glasgow, she has served on the organising committee for the Symposium for Seventeenth Century Scottish Literature, undertaken an internship with the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies, and from January to June 2025, has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.
When not embroiled in the medieval period, Alice enjoys reading tartan noir, and attempting recipes from the Great British Bake Off’s technical challenges.
Jessica Reid | Scottish Literature
Jessica Reid is a writer and researcher from Glasgow. She was recently awarded a PhD from the University of Glasgow for her thesis on the Edinburgh playwright and pamphleteer Thomas St Serfe. Her research concerns the interactions between literature, print and nation in the long eighteenth century. You can read some of her work in the Scottish Literary Review, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research and History Scotland. Jessica is also a Co-investigator on the British Academy-funded project Walking Perth’s Past, investigating walking and memory in Henry Adamson’s The Muses Threnodie for an upcoming podcast. With a background teaching Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, she is particularly drawn to overlooked texts, authors and narratives in her research and teaching. She relishes any opportunity to talk about books with other book lovers and looks forward to doing just that this coming August.
Sandro Eich | Theatre and Performance
Sandro is a PhD Researcher, Academic Policy Officer (Quality), and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of St Andrews. He holds degrees in English Studies, Linguistics and Phonetics, and Comparative Studies, and has studied at the University of Cologne and University College London. His PhD research investigates the forms and functions of whistleblowing in fiction, non-fiction, and dramatic writing from 1994 to 2022. Conceptualising whistleblowing as a form of meaning-making, the project seeks to re-define whistleblowing as a humanistic practice beyond its legal and organisational discourses. His research interests include the intersection of drama, media, and literary form; cultural production in times of digitality; inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary approaches towards literature and culture; and Higher Education pedagogy and policy.
Sandro teaches classes on drama and performance (early modern to contemporary), British and American fiction (nineteenth to twenty-first century), interdisciplinary methodology in the humanities, and academic writing skills. He is a fellow in the Johns Hopkins/University of St Andrews Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Network and serves on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS).
When Sandro is not chained to his office desk, he enjoys going to the theatre, over-caffeinating in cities unknown to him, and audibly enjoying TikTok just a little bit too much for his own good.
Rosaleen Maprayil | Theatre and Performance
Dr Rosaleen Maprayil graduated from the University of Reading in 2024. Her PhD examines Samuel Beckett’s stage plays in performance, using the frameworks of the phenomenology of objects and scenography to explore ideas about home and domesticity alongside gender, environment and landscape from a socio-political perspective. She has had work published in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and has an essay on the Irish Language production of Happy Days- Laethanta Sona in an upcoming volume entitled Beckett and Ecology. She has presented her work internationally and will be presenting her work at the Beckett Society conference in Edinburgh in June 2025.