top of page
Jack Abernathy
Jack Abernethy is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and his research focuses
on Scottish military involvement in the Dutch Revolt, c.1568-1609. In addition to his
studies, Jack is the Dutch and Low Countries editor on the Scotland, Scandinavia, and
Northern Europe Database (SSNE) at St Andrews and the book reviews editor for The
Mariner’s Mirror, the international quarterly journal of the Society for Nautical Research.
He is more broadly interested in Scottish and English diplomatic, military, and maritime
history, as well as Scottish and English migration to Northern Europe in the early modern
period.
Kate Anderson
Coming soon!
Vanessa Barcelos
Vanessa Barcelos is an English PhD candidate at the University of Miami. She holds an MA in
English from the same institution and another in Applied Linguistics from the State University of
Ceara, in Brazil. She’s recently authored “She, her, me - a witch? Women join the theological
debate of witchcraft in 17th-century England” in the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Her
research is centered on the relationship between race and gender in late medieval and early
modern discourses of witchcraft.
Laura Bauld
Laura Bauld is a Senior Curator for Glasgow Life Museums, with her curatorial remit and expertise covering European Decorative Arts from 1603-1800 including metalwork, glass, ceramics, treen, and furniture. From 2018, Laura was appointed as Project Curator for the Burrell Refurbishment Project, with responsibilities for collection research, exhibitions, and gallery interpretation development. Laura has also intensively researched LGBTQ + histories within Glasgow Life Museums, working in partnership with LGBTQ+ communities to improve access and visibility of these histories within the museum collections and venues. Laura was awarded a MA in History of Art and English Literature and a postgraduate MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow, specialising in the History of Collecting and Collections. Laura is the author of The Burrell’s Legacy: A Great Gift to Glasgow (Glasgow Life Museums, Glasgow, 2022), and Introducing British Silver (Glasgow Life Museums, Glasgow, 2024).
Ashley Brown
Ashley is a PhD researcher based at the University of Glasgow and funded by SGSAH. She is analysing masculinities present at Scottish universities in the post-Reformation period, which includes looking at James VI and I's impact on the institutions. Ashley has also written on masculinities present in the central middle ages. When not researching, Ashley runs a theatre company with her husband (Bottoms Up Theatre) and spoils her two cats too much.
Brenna Clark
Brenna Clark is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Guelph and holds a SSHRC
CGS-D to support her research. Her dissertation investigates the role of Orkney and Shetland,
Scotland's Northern Isles, in Europe's North Sea trade network around the turn of the seventeenth
century to better understand how their economic links reflected the hybrid sociocultural identity
of the islanders. Her research thus illuminates the ambiguous identity of Shetlanders and
Orcadians and the fluid position of the Northern Isles within Scotland's wider political and
economic ambits. Additionally, Brenna’s Master’s thesis used a comparative approach to
examine the triggers and characteristics of witchcraft accusation and prosecution in the Northern
Isles in the later-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Ashlyn Cudney
Ashlyn Cudney is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in early modern
Scottish history. Her dissertation examines ecclesiastical and secular bias on the island of Bute in
the seventeenth century. She is interested in deviance, social control, concepts of marginality and
peripherality, gender, and cultural transmission. Ashlyn’s research on the intersections between
gender and violence has most recently appeared in Deviance and Marginality in Early Modern
Scotland.
Alex Courtney
Alexander Courtney is the author of James VI, Britannic Prince (Routledge, 2024), the first part of a two-volume biography of James. With Michael Questier, he is the co-editor of James VI and I: Kingship, Government and Religion (Routledge, 2025). Alex is working with George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, Satoshi Tomokiyo and Estelle Paranque on the first edition of the recently discovered ciphered letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to be published by Routledge in 2027. He is Assistant Head (Teaching & Learning) at The Perse School, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Joseph Ellis
Joe has recently completed his PhD thesis at the University of York. Prior to this he completed a Master's degree, also at York, for which he was awarded the Early Modern History Dissertation Prize. His research focuses on the politicisation of royal travel, specifically the progresses of James VI & I in Scotland and England. He works as Senior House and Collections Officer for the National Trust at Smallhythe Place, a sixteenth-century property in the countryside of Kent. Having a keen interest in public history, Joe has undertaken a curatorship internship at Hampton Court Palace, and regularly contributes to blogs, history magazines and podcasts, most recently the History Extra Podcast.
Amilia Gillies
Amilia Gillies is a third-year doctoral researcher at the University of Kent, funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), and supervised by Professor Kenneth Fincham. She graduated with Distinction from the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) MA at Kent in 2022, for which she was awarded a “Tomorrow’s World” scholarship for academic achievement. She recently undertook a three-month curatorial research placement with Historic Royal Palaces and has presented on her work at the Institute of Historical Research, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and the Renaissance Society of America. Her review of Johanna Luthman's Family and Feuding at the Court of James I was recently published in English Historical Review.
Rima Greenhill
Rima Greenhill, PhD in Russian Language and Literature (University College London), and currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, USA. Rima is the author of ‘Shakespeare, Elizabeth and Ivan: The Role of English-Russian Relations in Love’s Labours Lost’ which explores Queen Elizabeth I’s diplomatic and trade relations with the Russian Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his heirs.
Anna Groundwater
Dr Anna Groundwater is Principal Curator, Renaissance and Early Modern History at National Museums Scotland. She is a cultural and social historian of early modern Scotland whose research interests include the material culture and memorialisation of James VI and I, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Most recently, she is the editor of Decoding the Jewels: Renaissance Jewellery in Scotland (Sidestone/NMS, 2024).
Emily Hay
Emily Hay is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher in Scottish Literature at the University
of Glasgow. Her PhD thesis explores the textual self-presentation of Mary Queen of
Scots from 1567-1587, and how this contrasts with how others wrote about her in the
same period. She has previously written on the connections between Marian writing
and the works of other English and Scottish women writers, Anne Lock and Elizabeth
Melville, and has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland talking about Mary’s status as a
writer and her alleged authorship of the Casket Sonnets.
Clare Jackson
Coming soon!
Maria Katsulos
Maria Katsulos (she/they) is a third-year PhD student at Northwestern University. They study
(trans)masculinities in early modern Europe with a particular focus on England, France, and their
imperial holdings. Maria is particularly interested in evaluating her ‘cross-dressed’ case studies in terms
of military, labor, and legal history to better articulate these individuals’ place within cisnormative
institutions and to draw larger conclusions about the mutually constitutive relationship between those
institutions and still-extant conceptions and experiences of gender.
Fergal Leonard
Dr Fergal Leonard is an associate fellow of Durham’s history department. His PhD thesis, Society, governance, and politics in the Elizabethan West March, c.1570 -1603, examined the evolution of the early modern state in the far north of England , with a particular focus on the political culture and agency of people across the social spectrum. He is contributing to two upcoming edited volumes: Neil Younger and Janet Dickinson (eds.), Burghley at 500: Quincentennial Essays on William Cecil (Boydell and Brewer, projected 2026); and Andy King, Jenny McHugh, and Gordon McKelvie (eds.), Scotland and England, c.1300 to 1603: War, Diplomacy, and Power (Brepols, projected 2026).
Laura Leslie
Laura is a final year PhD student at the University of Glasgow working on a study of John Erskine, first Earl of Mar (d. 1572), who was Guardian to James VI, and Regent of Scotland from 1571-2. Her thesis is particularly interested in the dynamics of the Marian Civil War, the regencies, and James' early childhood.
Gabriel Lonsberry
Gabriel Lonsberry is an Assistant Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, USA, where he teaches Shakespeare, Milton, and other figures of early modern literature and culture. His research centers on the Jacobean court masques and their relationships with the public drama of the period. His work has recently appeared in The Explicator, Renaissance Studies, and The Shakespearean International Yearbook.
Nicole Maceira-Cumming
Nicole Maceira Cumming recently completed her AHRC-funded PhD thesis, which examined the role of hunting in the Scottish court of James VI, c.1579-1603. From 2024-2025 she was a Teaching Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh and the lead Research Assistant on the A Very Quiet Street project (University of Glasgow/Woodlands Community Development Trust). Her previous roles have included 2022 research placement with the National Trust and University of Oxford, exploring the history of ‘Horse Power’ within National Trust properties. Recent publications include ‘Animals, dominion and the natural order in Post-Reformation Scotland’ (Scottish Church History, 2025) and ‘Reconstructing the menagerie of James VI, c.1579-1603’ (Scottish Archives, forthcoming).
Tristan Marshall
Tristan received his PhD in Jacobean theatre history from the University of Cambridge, where he is currently a Senior Member in English at Robinson College. He teaches early modern literature with a particular research interest in sixteenth and seventeenth century drama in both text and performance. A former Artistic Director of the Questors Theatre in West London and lecturer on Shakespeare at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, he currently lectures at Shakespeare’s Globe and was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020 for his contributions to the study of early modern theatre. Previous publications include Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages Under James VI & I (Manchester University Press, 2020), as well as articles on subjects including The Tempest’s imperialism, martialism on the early Jacobean stage, the poetics of Michael Drayton and theatre’s engagement with the politics of King James’s Union project. He is currently working on the theatrical patronage and influence of Anna of Denmark on the Jacobean stages. An article on Anna and the politics of Cymbeline will be out later this year, while a piece on Anna, her son Henry and the Jacobean masques is due for publication in 2025.
Hanna Mazheika
Dr Hanna Mazheika is a MSCA / TIES Fellow at Turku Institute for Advanced
Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of European and World History of the
University of Turku, Finland. She received her undergraduate degree in History in Belarus.
She subsequently undertook a Master's degree in History at the University of Warwick. In
2018, she completed a PhD in History at the University of Aberdeen. Her doctoral research
dealt with questions of cultural and religious interaction between the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania and the British Isles in the early modern period. Prior to taking up the position at
the University of Turku, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Polish Academy of
Sciences and as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw.
Kate McGregor
Kate McGregor is a doctoral candidate in Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Professor Michael Brown and Dr Amy Blakeway. Her thesis examines Foreign policy and diplomacy during the personal rule of James V, King of Scots (1528-1542), for which she is fully funded by the Ewan and Christine Brown Scholarship. She is currently awaiting publication of a successfully peer-reviewed article in the journal Scottish Archives on notaries and their clients in late medieval St Andrews. She is also contributing to an upcoming volume entitled Scotland and England, c.1300 to 1603: War, Diplomacy and Power, edited by Andy King, Jenny McHugh and Gordon McKelvie (Brepols: Forthcoming), with a chapter on Anglo-Scottish maritime encounters.
Seren Morgan-Roberts
Dr Seren Morgan-Roberts, from the University of Manchester, recently completed and successfully defended her PhD thesis 'Transnationalising Early Modern Kingship', which assesses the cultural and political impact of Basilikon Doron through an investigation into its numerous translations and publications across the British Isles and the Continent. She is currently working on a chapter that summarises some of her findings for a large global literary project, and hopes to publish her thesis sometime in the future. Today she will discuss some of these findings and ideas in her paper.
Catriona Murray
Catriona Murray is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in the art, objects and performances of the Stuart courts. Her first book, Imaging Stuart Family Politics, explored the strategic promotion of royal familial imagery as a compelling, but ultimately precarious, art of political communication. She is currently completing her second book project, which analyses the origins and development of public sculpture as a political agent in early modern Britain. Catriona has developed close working relationships with a number of international museums and is currently academic advisor to the National Galleries of Scotland's exhibition, The World of King James VI and I. She is passionate about making history and its artefacts accessible and works with curators to develop new display strategies using sound, scent, virtual and augmented reality.
Jennifer Ng
Jennifer Ng is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her Ph.D. in European History from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011. She is interested in early modern court culture, ritual, and the reign of James I of England. Her current projects include revising a book manuscript on the Jacobean Bedchamber, and researching the Venetian ambassador at the early Stuart Court.
Alexandra Plane
Alexandra is a librarian and doctoral student funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, co-supervised at Newcastle University and the National Library of Scotland. She is currently in the final stages of her doctoral project, a reconstruction of the Scottish and English libraries of King James VI and I. She has co-curated the National Library of Scotland exhibition 'Renaissance: Scotland and Europe 1480-1630'.
Elisabeth Rébeillé-Borgella
Dr. Elisabeth Rébeillé-Borgella is a French historian of the late sixteenth-century Scotland.
She graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2023 after conducting a doctoral research
on “Esmé Stuart d’Aubigny, First Duke of Lennox (c.1542-1583). A French Courtier in
Scotland”. Her interests are the reign of James VI in Scotland, the Stuart d’Aubigny family
and gender history. She is, at the moment, a tour guide and coordinator for Wee Ecosse that
delivers tours in Edinburgh in French on different themes including Edinburgh and its
women. She is also a freelance researcher.
Steven Reid
Coming soon!
Jamie Reid-Baxter
Coming soon!
Amy Saunders
Amy Saunders is an independent scholar specialising in the representation of early modern Stuart Kings and Queens in modern heritage sites. Amy’s work explores themes including gender, sexuality, fertility, and confessional identity. She also focuses on the construction of modern national, regional, and local identities through the reconstruction of the early modern past in heritage sites. She has published open access articles with Libros de la Corte and the Royal Studies Journal. Her forthcoming chapter in Elizabeth Hodgson and Sarah Crover’s collection The Queen’s Gambit: Nationalism & Royal Women in Early Modern England will explore the use of Elizabeth Stuart as a conduit between the past and present monarchy in heritage sites.
Megan Shaw
Megan Shaw is an art historian who recently completed her PhD at the University of Auckland with her thesis entitled ‘A Female Favourite: Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649)’. It considers how the duchess maintained and materialised royal favour at the Stuart court by exploring her cultural patronage and social networks. She has published work in the Furniture History journal and has forthcoming research on the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham and the art agent Balthazar Gerbier in edited collections with Brepols and Amsterdam University Press. Her research has been supported by a Junior Fellowship with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and she was recently awarded an Ann Ball Bodley Visiting Fellowship in Women’s History at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Charlie Spragg
Charlie is a History of Art PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, holding a scholarship from the Edinburgh College of Art. Her research explores King James VI & I's use of visual and material culture to cultivate an image as a distinctly 'imperial' 'British' European monarch. Alongside this, she has been working independently as a historical researcher, most recently for Historic Environment Scotland, and as a research assistant on the National Galleries Scotland exhibition, ‘The World of King James VI and I’. Charlie has recently taken on the role as a postgraduate steering committee member for the Centre of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Luca Tenneriello
Luca Tenneriello is a Post-Doc Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Kent, Canterbury (UK). His research interests range from early modern philosophy to contemporary ethical debates on the relationship between religion and the public sphere. He is the author of Thomas Hobbes. La religione e la coscienza [Thomas Hobbes. Religion and Conscience] (Pisa, 2023) and has edited the Italian edition of Hobbes’s Latin autobiographies, titled Vita di Thomas Hobbes di Malmesbury. Le due autobiografie latine (Milan, 2022), and the Italian edition of King James's Basilikon Doron (Rome, 2023).
Steven Veerapen
Steven Veerapen is an author and lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. He was born and raised in Paisley and has always had an interest in the early modern period. He has written both historical fiction (including murder mysteries set in Henry VIII's court) and nonfiction covering Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI and I. His next book, "Witches: a King's Obsession", is due for publication in September 2025 and will be about King James's attitude towards witches and witchcraft.
Joseph Wagner
Joseph Wagner earned his PhD at the University of St Andrews and currently teaches at the University of St Thomas (St Paul, Minnesota). He has been awarded the Scottish History Society’s Rosebery Prize and the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland’s Essay Prize for his research into how the Union of the Crowns affected Scottish involvement in transoceanic trade and colonisation in the seventeenth century. His articles can be found in the Journal of British Studies, Britain and the World, The Scottish Historical Review, and the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, among others.
Georgianna Ziegler
Georgianna Ziegler is the Thalheimer Assoc. Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has published widely on early modern women in literature and art, and curated major exhibitions at the Folger, including ‘Elizabeth I: Then and Now’, and with Heather Wolfe, a 2024 exhibition on Esther Inglis. Her article on Inglis’s self-portraits appeared recently in Renaissance Quarterly, and she also wrote the entries on Esther Inglis for the The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women and the History of the Book in Scotland vol. 1. She maintains a major website on Esther Inglis and is currently finishing the first book-length biography of her for Edinburgh University Press.
bottom of page