Nadia Franks | Modernism
Nadia is in her final year as a PhD research at the University of Glasgow having completed a Masters in English from California Polytechnic University Pomona. Her thesis, “Post-truth Motif in Contemporary Literature” centres evolving genre conventions in fiction as well as novelisation within non-fiction texts. She has over five years’ teaching experience at the university level, including two previous summers at SUISS (Modernism). Nadia‘s other interests include competitive swimming, surfing, cats and roller coasters.
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.
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.
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.
Kate Millar | Creative Writing
Kate Millar is a poet, writer, and educator from Edinburgh. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in New York City where she won the Paul Violi Prize for Poetry, and her MA (Hons) in English from the University of St Andrews where she was awarded the Principal’s Scholarship and the Lawson Memorial Prize for Excellence in English Literature. During her time in New York, she worked at Poets House running poetry workshops and interactive library tours for visiting students. She is a Clydebuilt 18 Poetry Fellow and has been nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in Cutleaf Journal, Gutter, Cleveland Review of Books, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her research interests include 20th-century and contemporary American poetry, cross-genre and hybrid writing, the ethics and poetics of attention, and mysticism in poetry.
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.
Roslyn Potter | Scottish Literature
Roslyn Potter is a PhD candidate and researcher in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research considers women’s writing, song, and ballad culture in the early modern period. By looking at various forms of literary transmission, such as manuscript and print, Roslyn has found a continuum between Scotland’s literary past and present with themes that still resonate today. Roslyn is also the current book reviews editor for The Bottle Imp and loves to hear about new Scottish works. As well as a passion for reading, singing, and Roslyn loves knitting – you will rarely see her without a new project on the go.
Sandro Eich | Theatre and Performance
Sandro holds a PhD in English and teaches at the University of St Andrews. He teaches classes on drama and performance, British and American contemporary fiction, interdisciplinary methodology in the humanities, and academic writing skills. He is also an Academic Policy Officer and Project Officer and the Learning and Writing Centre. 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 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. When Sandro is not replying to emails, he enjoys going to the theatre, over-caffeinating in the coffee shops of the world, and enjoying Instagram and 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.