Dr Barbara Vrachnas | Modernism
Barbara is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and has taught extensively on all periods of English literature. She has published work on Ouida, gender roles, publishing, material games and fashion in mid-late Victorian literature and periodicals. Among other topics her research interests also include Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Lucas Malet, Vernon Lee, the Gothic, mythology and children’s literature.
Nadia Franks | Modernism
Nadia is an American researcher working on a PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis focuses on analysing and defining post-truth literature, and, so far, includes a chapter on the post-truth iteration of the crime story and one on post-truth dystopia, centring on Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. Nadia recently chaired a panel on “News Media in Times of Crisis” at the MLA National Symposium in Glasgow, and has presented at several conferences, most recently PMLA 2019 (“Send in the Trolls: The Weaponization of Irony Within the Alt-Right Movement”). Nadia has taught Freshman Composition and English Literature at California Polytechnic University Pomona as well as Norco College. Her areas of interest include trauma theory, gender theory, British modernism, American postmodernism (particularly post-9/11 literature), and speculative fiction. Nadia‘s hobbies include record collecting, bike-riding, video games and competitive swimming; she also teaches swimming lessons. Future plans include driving a convertible across the continental United States and swimming the Catalina and English channels.
Will Entrekin | Creative Writing
Will Entrekin is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet, and screenwriter. Originally from New Jersey, Entrekin studied fiction and screenwriting at the University of Southern California under Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), Marc Norman (Shakespeare in Love), and Janet Fitch (White Oleander). His novel The Prodigal Hour was a number one Amazon bestseller, while his most recent novel Secondhand Emotions was a finalist for the Foreword Indie awards in the Adult Fiction (Romance) category. He is a current doctoral student in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, where he also teaches in the schools of English Literature and Modern Languages and Culture.
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.
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.
Dora Valkanou | Creative Writing
Dora Valkanou is a final year DFA student of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (distinction) from the University of Birmingham and a Masters of Philosophy in American Poetry from the University of Wales, Swansea. She has been a Tutor of Creative Writing at SUISS in Edinburgh since 2022. She also taught several courses of Creative Non-Fiction: Autobiography, Memoir and Autofiction at the University of Glasgow (2022 – 2023). She lectured in several Colleges in Greece over a period of twenty years. Her first novel, The Loving Chef, was published in Athens in 2014 by Kedros Publishers. She has published two books of poetry, one in the US and one in Greece, and is the recipient of the Nancy P. Schnader Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. For the DFA programme she is working on a novel on the theme of erotic passion, titled In Bed with Kierkegaard. Her future plans include circumnavigating the world, finding true love, and remaining young for ever. Author’s webpage: https://www.doravalkanou.com/
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 doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and teaches courses on modern and contemporary English Literature there and at Edinburgh Napier University. Her work focuses on postmodernity and gender in literature, art, and film. Her PhD thesis ‘The Brutality of Fact: Ethics and Identification in Queer and Women’s Autotheory’ has been recommended for publication following entry to the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies 2022. She has also acted as a member of the James Tait Black Award for Biography panel since 2021.
Dr Gina Lyle | Scottish Literature
Gina Lyle is a final year PhD researcher in the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature department, where her thesis analyses the uses of ‘meat’ in contemporary Scottish fiction with a focus on gender and class. Her research interests include the Anthropocene, the body, and providing critical engagement with under-examined women’s writing. You can read about Gina’s research on the body as meat in eSharp, and her writing on Scottish women writers and their work on scottishwomenwritersontheweb.net and The Bottle Imp.
Gina is an intern with the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies and a GTA for Scottish Literature’s first year courses, and she relishes any opportunity to celebrate Scottish fiction.
Dr Sadbh Kellett | Scottish Literature
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.
Sandro Eich | Theatre and Performance
Sandro is a PhD Researcher, Open Research Coordinator, and Interdisciplinary Education Research 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
Rosaleen Maprayil is a London based teacher and academic who is in the final year of her PhD at the University of Reading in the dept of Film, Theatre and Television. She holds degrees in English and History and a Masters in Modernism from Queen Mary College, University of London.
Her thesis focuses on a selection of Beckett’s plays in production. It seeks to present Beckett’s work for theatre as a means of exploring the wider themes of isolation, domesticity, ageing, gender and hostile landscapes that run through his work. The project explores how Beckett’s plays continue to be relevant to and resonate with modern audiences during times of socio-political crisis and intervening and engaging in debates around home and homeland that are pertinent to the lives of 21st century audiences.
Ros is a regular contributor to The Beckett Circle and has been published in the Journal of Beckett studies as well as Samuel Beckett Today with an article on Happy Days and Disaster in the most recent volume. She is currently co-editing a special issue of Samuel Beckett Today based on the conference she hosted at the University of Reading entitled Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma and Nationhood.
She was awarded a bursary by the Beckett International Foundation to attend the Samuel Beckett Summer School at Trinity College Dublin in 2018 and was invited to return in 2019. Ros has also presented papers at conferences in Reading (Modernist Archives in Context), Brussels (Beckett and the Non-Human) and Galway (IFTR: Theatre Ecologies) and will be presenting at Trinity College Dublin, this July (Lost Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Beckett). She is an English teacher in London where she has taught for 21 years in addition to having taught on Undergraduate and Masters modules in the Film, Theatre and Television Dept at Reading.