Eighteenth Century Studies people

Katie Halsey

Founder and Co-Director

Katie’s research interests lie mainly in the fields of eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature and print culture, in particular Jane Austen and the history of reading. In addition, she has wide-ranging interests in contemporary reading practices and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century library history, and welcomes applications for PhDs in all these subjects.

Katie is the Principal Investigator of the £1 million AHRC-funded project ‘Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers’.

See Katie's research profile

Emma Macleod

Founder and Co-Director

Emma’s work examines British political attitudes to international events in the late eighteenth century. She is currently co-editing the correspondence of James Wodrow and Samuel Kenrick (1750–1810) for Oxford University Press with Martin Fitzpatrick and Anthony Page (vol. 1 was published in August 2020, vol. 2 will appear in 2024, and there are two further volumes to come); examining the political trials of the 1790s in comparative perspective; and investigating the teaching of politics in Scottish universities in the late eighteenth century with colleagues at Aberdeen and the Open University. She would like to hear from prospective PhD students interested in any of these areas. She is president of the international and interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society from 2024–26.

See Emma's research profile

Colin Nicolson

Co-Director

Colin Nicolson is a leading expert on the history of the American Revolution. His work focuses on the origins of the Revolution in colonial Boston and the Imperial Crisis of 1765-1776. He would be interested in hearing from potential PhD students in this area. He is presently writing a book on John Adams and US–British diplomacy following the American Revolution.

See Colin's research profile

Craig Anderson

Craig is a Senior Lecturer in Law. His research interests include how Scots private law has developed since the late seventeenth century up to the present day, and in the continued relevance of historical sources in legal development.

See Craig's research profile.

Duncan Armstrong

Duncan is an MRes student supervised by Neville Wylie, currently researching the naval transport of Prisoners of War during the Second World War. His wider research interests involve the changing nature and treatment of POWs across centuries and the interconnected development of humanitarian law, as well as the material culture of remembrance.

Sam Bearhope

Sam is an MRes student supervised by Tom Marsden and Kelsey Williams. His current research focuses on the Russian conquest of the Western Caucasus (1802-1864) and the genocidal mindset prevalent among Caucasus commanders. He also has a keen interest in wider Russian society and culture, the history of empires and colonialism and film history. Sam previously completed a BA (Hons) History at the University of Stirling.

Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell

Maxine is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Books and Borrowing project. Her recently-completed PhD was on Scottish child readers in the long eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the Royal High School of Edinburgh. Her current research extends this work.

maxinebranagh.co.uk

Jim Caudle

Jim works primarily on James Boswell and Robert Burns, though he also has interests in eighteenth-century political sermons, copyright and eighteenth-century print culture in its widest sense. He worked for seventeen years as the Associate Editor at the Yale Boswell Editions. He also worked on the edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, and his edition of Allan Ramsay’s The Evergreen was published with EUP in 2024.

Timothy Cooke

Tim is a part-time PhD candidate, living in Hawaii, and supervised by Colin Nicolson and Gyorgy Toth. His project, entitled Colonial Ranger Operations in the Southeast: 1760 – 1783, investigates the evolution and influence of distinctive Colonial militia and irregular British units variously called “rangers,” “partisans,” “light cavalry,” and “mounted militia;” their reconnaissance, raiding, and unconventional warfare missions in the War for American Independence. This work argues that those unconventional aspects of eighteenth-century combat may be the only military practices to survive into the twentieth century.

Calum Cunningham

Calum Cunningham’s research continues to span a wide range of topics within Jacobite studies, including political, legal and social aspects. He is currently working on his first monograph, a project that builds on his PhD thesis. In addition, he is conducting ongoing research on the exiled Stuart court in Italy. Calum also serves as Book Reviews Editor for The Court Historian journal.

Calum’s recent publications include:
Baccolo, S. and C.E. Cunningham, (2024) ‘The Stuarts in Italy, 1766–1807: A Court in Perpetual Pretence’, in The Court Historian: The International Journal of Court Studies,29:2, 134–62, and Cunningham, C.E. and A. Montgomery (2024) ‘Gods and Monsters: Classical Allusion and the Jacobites’, History Scotland, 24:2, 30–6.

Alex Deans

Alex is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ‘Books and Borrowing 1750-1830’ project. Alex completed a PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2014, where his research on cultures of labouring-class reading and writing drew on the records of a number of Scottish subscription and circulating libraries. Prior to joining Books and Borrowing, he was part of the AHRC funded Curious Travellers project, which considered Romantic-period travel writing about Scotland and Wales. He has published book chapters and articles on various aspects of Enlightenment and Romantic literary culture, with a focus on labouring-class intellectual improvement, and writing about ecology and landscape in the period.

Jill Dye

Jill completed her PhD in 2018, under the supervision of Katie Halsey. Her research focussed on the books and borrowers of Innerpeffray Library, Crieff. Jill is now Library Services Manager for National Museums Scotland and the editor of the Library and Information History journal.

Maria Gemma Silva Fernandez

Gema is a PhD student studying under the supervision of Katie Halsey and Kelsey Jackson Williams. Her doctoral thesis studies the reception of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Gema is particularly interested in the ways in which Scott and Byron exploited the publishing context of the early nineteenth century.

Scott Gordon

Scott is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Colin Nicholson, currently researching British military strategy in the American Revolution (1775-83) using modern Counterinsurgency (COIN) theory to apply modern models to reassess the effectiveness of British eighteenth-century military doctrine in North America. The project will reexamine the enduring problems of conducting limited war to win hearts and minds and pacify local population centers, whilst also combatting local insurgencies.

Lucy Henry

Lucy is an AHRC-funded PhD student, supervised by Emma Macleod (Stirling), Alex Shepard (Glasgow), and David Brown (National Records of Scotland). Her CDA project will examine the Inverness Sheriff Court records in the latter half of the eighteenth century, analysing women and gender in the criminal cases found within, and listing them for the NRS catalogue.

Jacqueline Kennard Imrie

Jacqueline Imrie is currently undertaking a PhD, supervised by Ali Cathcart, Dave Griffiths, and Katie Halsey. Her work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and is entitled ‘Libraries and Class Identity in Scotland, 1800-1842: The Significance of Libraries in an Industrialising Society’. Jacqueline has a particular interest in labouring class readers, and in the ways in which libraries contribute to social mobility.

Abigail Ingram

Abigail is a current MRes student, supervised by Emma Macleod. Her research interests lie primarily within the eighteenth century to early nineteenth century, particularly in the East India Company, the wider British Empire and colonialism studies. She previously completed a BA (Hons) in History at University of Stirling with her undergraduate dissertation analysing East India Company reform, and her current MRes research is an investigation into the influence of Indian wealth on Stirling and the surrounding areas.

Clare Loughlin

Clare is a Lecturer in the Jacobite World at the University of Aberdeen. She was formerly a postdoctoral research fellow on the Scottish Privy Council Project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2020, which explored anti-Catholicism and the Church of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Anti-Catholicism across the British Isles continues to be a major area of research interest. More broadly, she is interested in the history of interconfessional relations, religious architecture, and the relationship between religion and landscape.

Isla Macfarlane

Isla is a University of Stirling-funded PhD student researching the Borrowing Records and Visitors’ Books of Innerpeffray Library, supervised by Katie Halsey and Michael Shaw (Stirling), and Lara Haggerty (Innerpeffray). She was also a member of the ‘Books and Borrowing 1750-1830’ (AHRC) project team.

Isla has recently published articles in ‘The Beatrix Potter Society Journal and Newsletter’ and ‘Studies in Travel Writing’; the latter of which, “Visitors Visiting Books: Visitors’ Books at the Library of Innerpeffray”, is available to read on Taylor & Francis Online. In 2024, she curated the annual exhibition at Innerpeffray Library, 'Travelling Tales', based on her research into the library's nineteenth-century visitors' books.

Visit Isla's research profile.

Katie Maclean

Katie Maclean is a Carnegie Trust-funded PhD student at the University of Stirling researching stage adaptations of Jane Austen. Her project investigates Jane Austen in amateur and professional theatre from the eighteenth century to the present and focuses on the queer dimensions of these works. She was the 2024 Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence at Goucher College, Maryland and a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House in August 2024. She is on the editorial board for the Romance, Revolution and Reform Journal.

Her most recent publication is Katie Maclean, ‘Mansfield Park (1999) versus Mansfield Park (2007): How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fanny Price?’, in Retelling Jane Austen, by Tammy Powley and April Van Camp (McFarland & Co, 2024).

Jamie Macpherson

Jamie’s PhD research, supervised by Colin Nicolson, focused on the political friendships of John Adams, second president (1797-1801) and Founding Father, a man who Joseph Ellis called “the most self-revealed, instinctively candid, gloriously fallible, wholly honest member of that remarkable, “band of brothers”. Jamie works as a research assistant on The Bernard Papers.

See Jamie's research profile

Philippe Maron

Phil’s PhD project was supervised by Colin Nicolson. Its focus was on John Adams and US-French diplomacy for the period 1778-1801, and he passed his viva in 2023. He previously completed a BA (Hons) Heritage and Conservation, and a MRes Historical Research, both at the University of Stirling.

See Philippe's research profile

Thomas Marsden

Thomas is a lecturer in European History whose research deals with Russia in the long-nineteenth century. He focuses on the topic of religious dissent, but is interested in what this reveals about the nature of Russian society and politics more widely. He is currently examining the relationship between imperial religious diversity and ethnic consciousness, and the ideological and institutional evolution of the Russian autocracy.

See Thomas’s research profile

Nicola Martin

Nicola is Lecturer in History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She is a transatlantic military historian, specialising in eighteenth-century British imperialism and Jacobitism. She completed her AHRC funded PhD ‘The Cultural Paradigms of British Imperialism in the Militarisation of Scotland and North America, c.1745-1775’ with the University of Stirling in 2019. Having focused on Scottish History, primarily Jacobitism, for my BA(Hons) and MSc at the University of Strathclyde, her doctoral research took a transatlantic approach to warfare and pacification. She joined the Centre for History at the UHI as a teaching assistant in September 2018 and as a lecturer in November 2019, having previously taught at the University of Stirling and for the University of Dundee/Open University.

Charley Matthews

Charley is an AHRC-funded PhD student working on queer women readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, supervised by Katie Halsey at Stirling and Katherine Inglis at the University of Edinburgh. Their research interests also include library history and the relationship between historical reading practices and the rise of the novel.

Charley’s most recent publication '"I feel the mind enlarging itself": Anne Lister’s gendered reading practices' is available to read on Taylor & Francis Online.

Gerard Lee McKeever

Gerry is a Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the ‘Books and Borrowing 1750–1830’ (AHRC) project team. He is the author of Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 (EUP, 2020).

His ongoing research interests in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary culture cover areas including regionalism, ‘improvement’, book history, and textual editing.

Andrew Muirhead

Andrew is an independent researcher in Clackmannanshire. His book, Scottish Presbyterianism Re-established, the case of Stirling and Dunblane Presbyteries 1687-1710, was published in 2021 by EUP. He is a volunteer guide for the Leighton Library and Reviews Editor for Scottish Church History. He is a former President of the Scottish Church History Society.

Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman

Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman is an AHRC-funded PhD Researcher, co-supervised by Katie Halsey (University of Stirling), Gerard McKeever (University of Edinburgh), and Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow). Her thesis analyses the relationships between novel reading and ideas of ‘improvement’ in Scotland between 1800 and 1837, with a specific focus on the Scottish novels of Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, John Galt, Elizabeth Hamilton, James Hogg, and Walter Scott. She has published in The Burney Journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and the Burns Chronicle and is currently the Early Career Representative for the British Association for Romanic Studies (BARS) and the Newsletter Editor for Romance, Revolution & Reform.

Anna Pavičić

Anna is a PhD student supervised by Dr. Jonathan Brown and Dr. Leslie Dodd (Stirling). Her research aims to provide a comparative analysis of the history, functionality and relevance of Scots law of promise. Her other research interests include Scots private law and legal history.

Katharina Pruente

Katharina is an SGSSS-funded PhD student who works on the social networks of Archibald Campbell, fifth earl of Argyll and chief of Clan Campbell (1558-1573). Her project is supervised by Dr Ali Cathcart (History), Dr Kelsey Jackson Williams (Literature), and Dr Dave Griffiths (Sociology). Her wider research interests include cooperation and conflict in the early modern period, clan structures and government before 1600 and the role of ambassadors in wider European politics.

Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland

Brianna is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and her most recent publications include Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing Scandalous Lessons (2022) and Allan Ramsay’s The Tea Table Miscellany co-edited with Professor Murray Pittock (2023). She was the BSECS-Georgian Papers Fellow in 2023, where she is investigating Dorathea Jordan, a prima donna who was also the known mistress of William IV. In 2023, she was granted a bursary from the WSG to conduct research for her new book on Georgian Prima Donnas.

She was a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House (2017) and the University of Sydney (2017 & 2019) with her most recent visit culminating in several practice-based, collaborative performances between Scotland’s Concerto Caledonia and Melbourne’s Evergreen Ensemble, including the historically led album Curious Caledonians (2020).

Jennifer Robertson

Jennifer is a part-time PhD student, supervised by Katie Halsey at Stirling and Elspeth Jajdelska at the University of Strathclyde. The topic of her research is Jane Austen and written forms of authority in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century.

Jennifer’s most recent publication is ‘“Edmund Inconsistent”: Edmund Bertram, Fanny Price and the Issue of Evangelicalism in Mansfield Park’, Persuasions Online, 42:1 (Winter 2021), for which she won the 2020 Jane Austen Society U.K. Graduate and Early Career Researcher Prize.

Read the essay.

Jennifer has also co-written a chapter with Katie Halsey for the forthcoming publication, A Literary Education: Women's Pedagogical Exchange, 1690-1850, shortly to be published by Edinburgh University Press, and edited by Louise Joy and Jessica Lim.

Stuart Salmon

Stuart teaches American, British, and European history at the University of Stirling and has taught at the Universities of Dundee and Edinburgh. His PhD (2010) was on the Loyalist Regiments of the American Revolution, supervised by Colin Nicolson.

Josh Smith

Josh is an AHRC-funded PhD student working on political readers and reading in early-nineteenth century subscription libraries, with a particular focus on the records of the Bristol Library Society and the Leighton Library in Dunblane. His research interests also include the book publishing and printing networks of anti-Jacobin fiction as well as British politics of the Regency era.

Robbie Tree

Robbie submitted his PhD thesis in August 2024. This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and his thesis investigated the Scottish Privy Council between the Williamite Revolution of 1689 and the institution’s abolition in 1708. His main interests are in government administration, church government, elections, and coal mining in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Robbie’s recent publications include: ‘Navigating Marginality: The Coal Mine Workers of Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in Allan Kennedy & Susanne Weston (eds.), Life at the Margins in Early Modern Scotland (Woodbridge, 2024), pp. 145-160; ‘Controverted Elections, Electoral Controversy and the Scottish Privy Council, 1689-1708’, Parliamentary History, 43: 1 (February 2024), pp. 53-71; and ‘The Bass Rock Siege, 1691-1694’, History Scotland, 23: 6 (November-December 2023), pp. 36-41.

Angus Vine

Angus’s research focuses on early modern literature and culture, with particular interests in antiquarianism, manuscript culture, book history, the works of Francis Bacon, mercantile culture, and the organization of knowledge. Angus’s eighteenth-century interests include the editing and presentation of Shakespeare in the period, and the culture of commerce. Angus would like to hear from potential students in these areas.

See Angus's research profile

Shaun Wallace

Shaun is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, specialising in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century slavery in the US South. He is currently writing his first book which uses the Fugitive Slave Database, a bespoke database of newspaper advertisements for enslaved runaways, to investigate fugitives and fugitivity and to explore themes including enslaved rebelliousness, literacy, transatlantic print culture, and slaveholding women.

One of Shaun’s recent publications is; Shaun Wallace, ‘Fugitive Voices: Artfulness, Performance, and ‘The Other’ in Advertisements for African and African American Fugitives in the Early National United States’ in Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal, and Pia Wiegmink (eds.), American Cultures as Transnational Performance: Commons, Skills, Traces (Routledge, 2021). DOI: 10.4324/9781003048947-8

See Shaun's profile

Kelsey Jackson Williams

Kelsey is a historian of the book, mostly in early modernity, and often in Scotland. He is currently writing a trade history of book collecting during the Napoleonic Wars, undertaking a senior research fellowship at Blackie House Library and Museum in Edinburgh, and conducting, with Daryl Green (Edinburgh), a pilot research project on country house libraries in Scotland. He welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in all aspects of book history in the handpress period. Kelsey is also the general editor of the Scottish History Society, and is always keen to receive proposals for new volumes or miscellany pieces.

Visit Kelsey's website.

Congratulations to members

We congratulate Jim Caudle on the publication of his edition of Allan Ramsay’s The Evergreen, now out with Edinburgh University Press.

Congratulations to Katie Halsey on joining the editorial board of Brill’s Library of the Written Word series.

We congratulate Kelsey Jackson Williams on his appointment to the position of Senior Research Fellow at Blackie House Library and Museum.

Congratulations to Jacqueline Kennard on the award of a British Association for Romantic Studies Stephen Copley Bursary to undertake archival research in Orkney, related to her project ‘Libraries and Class Identity in Scotland, 1800-1842: The Significance of Libraries in an Industrialising Society’.

We congratulate Philippe Maron on the successful outcome of his viva. Congratulations, Dr Maron!

We congratulate Calum Cunningham on the successful outcome of his viva. Calum’s thesis is entitled ‘Lawful Sovereignty: The Political Criminalisation and Decriminalisation of Jacobitism, 1688–1788’.

Congratulations to Katie Maclean on being awarded a Carnegie Trust PhD scholarship for her doctoral project, ‘Adapting Jane Austen on Stage, 1895-2022’.

Congratulations to Jacqueline Kennard on being awarded ESRC funding for her Masters and PhD work, ‘Libraries and Class Identity in Scotland, 1800-1842: The Significance of Libraries in an Industrialising Society’.

We congratulate Jill Dye, now of the National Museums of Scotland, on being awarded funding from the AHRC to carry out further research into the history of their collections.

Congratulations to Kelsey Jackson Williams on his promotion to Associate Professor.

We congratulate Gerry McKeever on his appointment as Lecturer in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Congratulations to Alex Deans on his new job as Research Associate on the Curious Travellers 2 project at the University of Glasgow.

Congratulations to Phil Miller on his appointment as Communications Advisor to Daniel Johnson MSP, the Labour shadow secretary for Finance and Economy.

We congratulate Mhairi Rutherford on the successful outcome of her viva, and on her appointment as a Research Assistant on the Book Owners Online project.

Congratulations to Lauren Moffatt on winning the Dee Amy Chinn Gender Studies prize for her undergraduate dissertation “A Patchwork Monster: The Making of Madwomen in Neo-Victorian Gothic Feminist Texts.”

We congratulate Jacqueline Kennard on winning the Edward & Thomas Lunt Prize, awarded for the best performance in English Studies at the University of Stirling.

Congratulations to Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman on being awarded a Visiting Doctoral Researcher fellowship at the University of Berkeley

Congratulations to Katie Halsey on her promotion to Professor!

We congratulate Gerry McKeever on winning the BARS First Book Prize for his monograph Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 (2020).

We congratulate Angus Vine on his promotion to Associate Professor.

Congratulations to Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell and James McKean on the award of the PhD!

We congratulate Jacqueline Kennard on the award of a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship 2021, and for winning the Ember Award 2021 for the best piece of undergraduate writing at the University of Stirling.

We congratulate Katie Halsey on the award of just over £1 million from the AHRC for the project Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers.

Congratulations to Duncan Hotchkiss and Jamie Macpherson on the award of the PhD!

Congratulations to Emma Macleod on the publication of Volume 1 of the Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1780-1810 (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-edited with Martin Fitzpatrick and Anthony Page

We congratulate Nicola Martin on her new job at the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands!

Congratulations to Angus Vine, on the award of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Angus’s project is entitled ‘Mercantile Humanism: Knowledge-Making in Early Modern Britain’. We also congratulate Angus on his election to Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society.

Congratulations to Kelsey Jackson Williams, who has just been appointed as the general editor for the Scottish History Society.

We congratulate Jennifer Robertson on winning the Jane Austen Society UK Essay Prize, 2021.