All staff participating in these workshops have had PVG checks and are cleared to work with under-18s.
Dr Natalia Liebnitz is an award-winning YA author, whose debut novel was endorsed by Amnesty International and nominated for Dublin’s Literary Award in 2018. Her third book took joint first place with Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper at the Nottingham Big City Reads Festival for ‘Book of the Year’, and her last novel was listed in The Independent’s ’15 Best YA Books’.
Dr Eamon McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies. His research focuses mostly on Argentina and he has written about literature, film and visual art. He is interested in questions related to genders and sexualities and has published on women artists, contemporary masculinities and queer identities.
Dr Jacky Collins, Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Stirling University and the Festival Director for Newcastle Noir. As ‘Dr Noir’, she regularly interviews crime fiction authors at national and international events. Jacky also hosts a series of author ‘consultations’ on the Newcastle Noir YouTube channel – ‘The Doctor Will See You Now’. More recently she translated Antonia Lassa’s Llevado en la piel (Skin Deep).
Ms Rosie Al-Mulla is the University of Stirling’s Assistant Archivist and Archivist for the Scottish Political Archive. She co-chairs the Scottish Universities’ Special Collections and Archives Group and is an Editor for Archives and Records, the journal of the Archives and Records Association UK & Ireland.
Dr Darren Elliott-Smith is a published Video Essayist (Lisbon LGBTQ+ Film Festival, [in] Transition Journal) and gender studies scholar at the University of Stirling, who specialises in representations of LGBTQ+ and gender identities in Film and TV Studies.
Dr Coree Brown Swan is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Stirling. She is an expert in UK and Scottish Politics, with a keen interest in political campaigns and political participation.
Dr Steph Rennick is a philosopher, lecturer in interactive media, and co-creator of the Video Game Dialogue Corpus. She works with game companies to improve representation, understand audiences, and help tell new stories, and her research on gender and video games has been featured at TEDx and in mainstream and gaming press, from BBC Radio 4 to Kotaku.
Dr Conor McKeown is a Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Stirling. His current research interests include ‘Eco-games’ and he teaches and supervises a range of digital projects, including practical games design.
Dr Angus Vine is currently the Programme Director in English Studies at the University of Stirling. He has written three major scholarly books on the Renaissance, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. With Professor Katie Halsey, he has published the collection Shakespeare and Authority (2018).
Professor Katie Halsey is a leading authority on Jane Austen and her times. She is the author of numerous publications, including Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945 (2012) and the Director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Stirling.
Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis is Lecturer in History at the University of Stirling. His current research addresses transnational HIV activism in Europe, and has won a prestigious award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Papadogiannis’ articles have been published in flagship journals such as Social History and Contemporary European History.