SMPRG people

Staff members connected to the Stirling Magazines and Periodicals Research Group.

Rosie Al-Mulla is the Assistant Archivist in Information Services and the Archivist for the Scottish Political Archive, based in History, Heritage and Politics. Her role is to support researchers using Stirling’s archival collections, many of which include magazines, periodicals and other printed material. An overview of the SPA collection can be found in this review article co-authored with Sarah Bromage.

Kirstie Blair is a leading scholar of Victorian literature and culture, whose work frequently explores the print culture of industrial workers. Her study of Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press and Community was 2019 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year. She led the AHRC-funded Piston, Pen and Press project and has also edited an anthology of Scottish newspaper verse, The Poets of the People’s Journal.

Sarah Bromage is Head of University of Stirling Collections. She has an interest in print history and previously worked for the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records. She is co-founder of the Pathfoot Press at the University of Stirling.

Ian Cawood is a member of the Centre for Printing History and Culture at Birmingham City University, for whom he co-edited Print, Politics and the Provincial Press (Peter Lang, 2019). He is currently series editor for the forthcoming 3 volume Edinburgh History of the Modern Radical Press.

Scott Hames led the AHRC Scottish Magazines Network and has various research interests in post-1960s political print, especially in the Scottish context. Some of this work appears in The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution.

Steven Harkins authored the monograph Poor News: Media Discourses of Poverty in Times of Austerity, which examined news coverage of poverty in the UK press between 1985-and 2015. He is currently investigating street papers in a project that looks at tackling homelessness through social enterprise.  He is also working on research into historical narratives of poverty in the UK press between 1945 and 1975.

Charlotte Lauder finished her PhD on popular Scottish magazine culture in June 2023. Her thesis focussed primarily on the People’s Friend magazine, but also examined women’s magazines, political magazines, and manuscript magazines produced in Scotland between 1870 and 1920. She has written on popular Scottish magazine culture in Victorian Periodicals Review and Scottish Literary Review, and her work on women’s magazines has been featured on BBC Scotland News and BBC Radio Scotland.

James Morrison leads the MSc in International Journalism and is a former local and national newspaper reporter. His PhD (and subsequent monograph) focused on the interplay between UK press portrayals of young people and public attitudes. Much of his research has been concerned with the construction and contestation of discourses around marginalised groups in newspapers and their online comment threads.

Louisa Preston is an artist-publisher and researcher who aims to develop new understandings of post-digital publishing practice. She makes use of zines and the magazine format, in conjunction with her website Research Town, to document, reflect on and analyse auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Current research seeks to examine the dynamics of art-publishing ecosystems and the roles of initiatives supporting small press and self-publishing led by arts organisations in remote and rural communities of Scotland.

Michael Shaw currently leads the RSE-funded project ‘Homosexuality and the Scottish Periodical Press 1885-1928'. He has written extensively on Scotland’s fin de siècle little magazines and recently wrote an article for Studies in Scottish Literature on William and Elizabeth Sharp’s Glasgow Herald Reviews of the Paris Salons. He was previously research assistant on the Carnegie-funded project ‘The People’s Voice: Scottish political poetry, song and the franchise, 1832-1918', building a freely accessible database that largely consists of newspaper and magazine poetry.

Gyorgy Toth is researching the transnational relations of the Native American radical sovereignty movement during the late Cold War. In this context he has theorized newspapers as records of and scripts for performances of Native status and rights, and studied Akwesasne Notes, the flagship newspaper for American Indian sovereignty. He is currently supervising a PhD project on the transformation of Native American education, drawing on periodicals such as the Journal of American Indian Education and the Tribal College Journal.

Maria Vélez-Serna is researching how industrial and ‘useful’ media has participated in extractivism, with a focus on large-scale coal mining in Colombia and Scotland. This includes work on Exxon’s public relations magazines, particularly their visual content and patronage of local cultural elites. She has also researched early cinema and has an interest in early 20th-century trade journals such as the Glasgow Entertainer.