Postgraduate research students

Crafting Kinships across Time: Queer and Trans Narratives in Modern and Contemporary Scottish Literature

This thesis investigates the works of four Scottish writers who use literary forms and devise aesthetic strategies around queerness, transness and nonnormative kinships, reacting to cisheteronormative literary conventions. It covers Scottish literary histories which stretch from the beginning of the twentieth century until 2026, concurrently outlining some of the most salient societal and legal changes in modern and contemporary Scottish history. My critical analysis of prose fiction and nonfiction, poetry, artistic texts alongside ephemera and other marginal forms of writing demonstrates the myriad means by which literary forms make visible marginalised identities, while circulating underground knowledge and shaping alternative kinship structures. The thesis traces degrees of literary codedness and openness, evaluating each author’s distinct personal experience in relation to their socio-historical and legal milieu. Thus, I highlight how these authors write queer and trans selves into being whilst dealing with concerns around (in)visibility and safety, and practicing (self)care amidst social marginalisation. 

• Professor Alan Riach
• Dr Corey Gibson

• School of Critical Studies PGR Research Support Funding. £450, 2024
• Scottish History Endowments. £ 187.90, 2023/2024
• The Eglinton Fellowship Scholarship. £3,300, 2023/2024
• The Edwin Morgan Scholarship for Research in Scottish Literature. £5000, October 2023
• The Edwin Morgan Scholarship for Research in Scottish Literature. £5000, October 2022.
• Recipient of the Neil Munro Medal in Scottish Literature, 2021
• Recipient of the Alexander Scott Prize in Scottish Literature, 2021
• Recipient of the William Graham Prize in Scottish Literature, 2018

• The Same Animal? New Directions in Scottish Literature, UCSL PG Symposium: A one-day symposium (2 May 2025) at the University of Stirling which invites PGRs working on any aspect of Scottish Literature to share their research. Paper titled, '"I was a she was a he was a we": Ali Smith’s Queer Relationality and Ethical Mythmaking in Girl Meets Boy (2007)'.
• Scotland Within and Outwith: Internal and External Perceptions of a Nation, CSCS PG Symposium: A one-day symposium (30 April 2025) at the University of Glasgow which explores how the concept of Scotland as a nation and a source of identity continues to evolve as well as the external and internal perceptions of Scotland, throughout the past and today. Paper titled, 'Redressing Scotland's National Identity: Queer Diasporic Voices in Maud Sulter's Alba Sonnets (1995)'.
• Queer Forms and Kinship in the work of Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan: A workshop (1 April 2025) delivered as part of a research commission between The Alasdair Gray Archive and The Edwin Morgan Trust. The presentation explores the socio-historical context behind Gray and Morgan’s writing and their literary connections based on the themes of alternative ways of being and kinships.
• Queer Form in Scottish Writing: A one-day symposium at the University of Glasgow (10 July 2024) to launch this Special Issue of Scottish Literary Review. Paper titled, '"Writing Beyond the Ending": Catherine Carswell's The Camomile (1922) as a Queer Epistolary Novel'.
• The fourth World Congress of Scottish Literatures hosted by the School of English at the University of Nottingham (3-7 July 2024): Paper titled, '"If you go for a quickie, get your money first!”: Queer flânerie, same-sex prostitution, and surveillance in
  John Henry Mackay’s The Hustler (1926)'.
• Fin de Sexe? A Symposium on Sexuality: A one-day symposium at the University of Edinburgh (27 June 2024) exploring how the concept of 'sex' was theorised at the turn of the 20th century. Paper titled, 'Queer Pederasty in John Henry Mackay’s Sagitta’s Books of the Nameless Love'.
• The Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference 2024 at Royal Holloway University of London: Contribution to the panel titled 'The David Rizzio Project: David Rizzio across Arts and Media' (21 June 2024). 
• Homosexuality and Scottish Culture 1880-1945: This one-day symposium (18 June 2024) at the University of Stirling brings together researchers working on queer sexualities in Scotland across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Paper titled, ‘Unsettling Queer Orientations: De-idealising Modern Pederasty in John Henry Mackay's Sagitta's Books of the Nameless Love'.
• What is Scotland: Reinventions and Connections, CSCS PG Symposium: A two-day symposium at the University of Glasgow exploring issues at the forefront of Scottish studies (23-24 May 2024). Paper titled, ‘To be gay and to be Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive conditions’? Exploring the Formation of the Scottish Literary Canon and Queer Writing'.
• David Rizzio at the Scottish Court (Workshop 3): This third workshop, funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop Award, was hosted at the Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh (13 October 2023). It investigates how David Rizzio (1533-1566), confidential secretary of Mary Queen of Scots, has been represented in literature, opera, painting and cinema. Paper titled, 'A Portrayal of David Rizzio's queerness in 21st century cinema'.
• When It Changed: Women in SF/F Since 1972: To mark the 50th anniversary of Joanna Russ’s landmark short story, ‘When It Changed’, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow proposed an online conference on women’s role in reshaping science fiction (3-4 December 2022). Paper titled, '‘Naomi Mitchison's Revision of “Pure” Science and Phallic Utopias in Solution Three’.
• Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition (1880-1940): An online conference hosted at the University of St Andrews (16-18 September 2022). Paper titled, 'Reclaiming Women’s Voices in the Poetry of Violet Jacob and Marion Angus'.

Graduate Teaching Assistant: Scottish Literature Level One 

• Scottish Literature 1A: The Fantastic and the Real
• Scottish Literature 1B: Stories We Tell Ourselves

Graduate Teaching Assistant: Italian

• Italian Culture (Level 1 and 2)
• Italian Language for International Mobility
• Italian Language for Professional Purposes (Glasgow School of Art)

• Researcher at the Alasdair Gray Archive and the Edwin Morgan Trust: I have traced the interpersonal and artistic connections between Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan, exploring how they experienced and wrote about unconventional and queer love stories, and recording their enduring impression on Scottish society and the arts.
• Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2024 Winner. Article titled, 'Naomi Mitchison's Revision of "Pure" Science and Phallic Utopias in Solution Three'
• Conference Co-Administrator and Panel Chair, 'Going Steady': Gender Research in Turbulent Times, Annual PGRNS Conference, 9 March 2023 at the University of Strathclyde.
• Conference Administrator - Intern (English Language & Linguistics), December 2022-September 2023.
• Committee Member, The Postgraduate Gender Research Network of Scotland, March 2022-present.
• President of the Scottish Literature Society, 2020-2021.