Keynote Speakers

Dr Peter Mackay is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews. Originally from the Isle of Lewis, he is an expert in Scottish and Irish literature from 1800 onwards, and especially in Scottish Gaelic literature. His poetry collections Gu Leòr / Galore (Acair 2015) and Nàdur de / Some Kind of (Acair 2020) were shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year; Nàdur de was also longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. An AHRC / BBC Next Generation Thinker, he is a frequent broadcaster on Radio 3 and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.

Dr Mackay's full profile

Dr Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History and Director of the Rare Books School in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. His research interests include: 

• History of the book since 1750; history of publishing; history of authorship; literary and publishing archives; modern manuscripts; the publishing history of the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Scottish literature since 1750, especially J.M. Barrie; Robert Louis Stevenson; Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish literary renaissance; Muriel Spark; the history of Scottish publishing.  

Dr Nash's full profile

Rhona Brown is a graduate of Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities. Her PhD, entitled '"For what use was I made, I wonder?": The Construction and Revision of Robert Fergusson in his Cultural Contexts', was completed in 2004. She joined Scottish Literature as a Lecturer in 2006, and teaches across the Scottish Literature undergraduate degree

Rhona's research specialism is in eighteenth-century Scots language poetry, the history of the Scottish periodical press and textual editing. Her first monograph, Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press, was published in 2012, and she has published widely on the work of Fergusson, Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, as well as eighteenth-century journalism, the development of the periodical press, eighteenth-century clubs, societies and networks, and eighteenth-century Scottish literary culture in general.

Professor Brown's full profile