Research Team

Principal Investigator: Dr Mary-Ann Constantine (CAWCS) works on Welsh Romanticism and has led two previous AHRC-funded projects: ‘Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales’ and ‘Wales and the French Revolution’. Her research interests include Romantic forgery, ballad and folk-song collection, travel writing and Welsh radical networks.

Co-Investigator: Professor Nigel Leask (Glasgow) has been Regius Chair of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University since 2004, and has published widely in the area of Romantic literature and culture. His research interests include Robert Burns and Scottish literature 1750-1850, Romantic Orientalism, travel writing and Empire, and Anglo-Indian literature of the Romantic period.

Research Fellow: Dr Ffion Mair Jones (CAWCS) has worked and published extensively on the correspondence networks of Romantic-era Wales, including that of Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg). Her other research interests include Welsh folk-song, the printed ballad tradition and the ‘interlude’ or folk-play.

Research Fellow: Dr Elizabeth Edwards (CAWCS) works on Romantic-era writing from and about Wales, and has a particular interest in women’s writing (Hester Piozzi, Felicia Hemans) and the work of labouring-class authors: she is the editor of an anthology of English-language poetry from Wales, and has recently completed an edition of the poems of Richard Llwyd, ‘Bard of Snowdon’.

Research Fellow: Dr Alex Deans (Glasgow) recently completed his AHRC sponsored PhD on the politics and poetics of labouring-class reading and writing during the Scottish Enlightenment. He has delivered conference papers on the work of Robert Burns, James Hogg and labouring-class autobiography in the Romantic period, and is a member of the Scottish Romanticism Research Group at the University of Glasgow.

Project assistant: Dr Vivien Estelle Williams. Before moving to Glasgow for her PhD in English Literature and Music, Vivien studied foreign languages and literatures at the University of Bari. She specialises in the long eighteenth-century, with a particular focus on Scotland and cultural history. She has been awarded the Daiches-Manning Fellowship (IASH, University of Edinburgh) and the Grete Sondheimer Fellowship (The Warburg Institute, London), and is the co-editor of the forthcoming book The Cultural History of Musical Instruments in Scotland, 1700-Present Day (Birlinn).

Post-doctoral Research Student: Kirsty McHugh was funded by the AHRC to work on her doctoral thesis ‘Northern English Travellers to Wales and Scotland 1760–1840: a study of manuscript accounts from Yorkshire and Lancashire’. Kirsty has written articles (page in progress) and contributed several blogs (link in progress) about her work to the project; she also transcribed the manuscript account by Anne Lister of her tour of Wales in 1822.

She is currently curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Systems developer: Dr Luca Guariento was awarded a PhD at the University of Glasgow with a dissertation on the English polymath and physician Robert Fludd (1573/4-1637). Besides his research interests in Musicology, early-modern thought, and History of Ideas, he has a genuine passion for the digital humanities. He was project assistant of The Medical Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen project, and developed the web resource of Historical Music of Scotland project. He is digital humanities research officer at the University of Glasgow and digital fellow of Cultures of Knowledge (University of Oxford).

Consultant: Dr R. Paul Evans, author of a PhD on Pennant and of several key articles about his life and work.