Dr Louisa Preston

Louisa most recently completed her WiRe (Women in Research) Post-Doctoral Fellowship at University of Münster, Book Studies at the end of April 2021. She was awarded her PhD titled ‘Post-Digital Audience Engagement Activity in and across Visual Arts and Publishing’ from the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication, University of Stirling and the School of Management, University of St Andrews in 2019. Her thesis illuminated complex and transforming relationships between publishers, cultural organisations, and their audiences, reinforcing and enhancing our understanding of the place and role of publishing amongst other cultural mediums in the post-digital age. She graduated from the MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling in 2012. She also completed the M.F.A and B.A (Hons) in Fine Art at DJCAD, University of Dundee in 2008 and 2004 respectively.

Louisa worked as a professional artist based in Dundee between 2004 and 2011. Her interest in publishing began with the gallery and artist publications she created and was included in as part of exhibitions. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. The Royal Scottish Academy holds a selection of artworks she produced on the RSA John Kinross Scholarship.

Louisa has worked in gallery assistant and gallery technician roles at Dundee Contemporary Arts and was project assistant at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Cooper Gallery. Louisa has a range of editorial and production experience from these roles in addition to digital publishing experience at Edinburgh Business School.

Louisa's research is situated within publishing studies, print culture and book history. Louisa is developing research under the banner of artist-publisher/researcher. She is interested in the potential for creative practice research methodologies to produce fresh insights into publishing studies and contemporary book cultures, which draw on practice-based studies approaches to research in the social sciences and contemporary arts practice research.

Louisa is also keenly interested in the concept and framing of the post-digital as a productive mode for thinking about current phenomena of increasingly intermeshing activity in the production of and engagement with cultural content and experiences in publishing, the visual arts and creative industry sectors more broadly, such as games, music and theatre.

Louisa teaches across the Postgraduate MLitt Publishing Studies course on modules which introduce the dynamics of the publishing industry, cover the publishing process from manuscript to market and the practical publishing project. Louisa also supervises students' Dissertations and Digital Research Projects. Supervisee topics have ranged from comics and graphic novels, zines and independent publishing, book cover design, social media marketing and celebrity authorship.

Louisa holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and is a Fellow of the HEA.