ISHR Visiting Fellows

2016 – 2017

The ISHR is delighted to announce that in 2016-17 the ISHR will host two Visiting Research Fellows in the autumn term, Dr Michelle D. Brock from Washington and Lee University, Virginia, and Dr Valerie Wallace from the Victoria University, New Zealand.

Dr Michelle D. Brock is an Assistant Professor of British History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her research interests centre on religious belief and identity in early modern Scotland. Dr Brock’s first book, Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700, was published with the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series (Routledge, 2016). She is the author of articles in the Journal of British Studies and Critical Survey, as well as a number of editorials connecting history and pedagogy to current events.

Dr Michelle D. Brock
Dr Michelle D. Brock

While at the ISHR, Dr Brock will be working on project titled Hearing is Believing: The Social Life of Sermons in Early Modern Scotland. This project explores the personal experience and communal event of sermon-going in Scotland from the Reformation through the seventeenth century. Put simply, this work seeks to understand how attending, hearing, and reading regular sermons informed daily lives, social relationships, political convictions, and identities in early modern Scotland. As part of this research, she will be using St. Andrew’s collection of manuscript sources, including sermons, sermon notebooks, diaries, and commonplace books. Dr Brock will also present her research to staff and postgraduate students in the ISHR and Reformation Studies Institute during her fellowship in St Andrews.

Dr Valerie Wallace lectures at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Dr Wallace is a historian of Scotland, Britain and the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is interested in the history of political thought and the intersection of religion and radical politics.

Dr Valerie Wallace
Dr Valerie Wallace

While based at St Andrews Dr Wallace will be working on her current book project, Empire of Dissent: Scottish Presbyterianism and Reform Politics in the British World, 1820-1850, which aims to transform our understanding of colonial radicalism by documenting the explosive but uncharted influence of Scottish Presbyterian political ideas. The project explores the political careers of five significant, but under-researched, colonial reformers: Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), a missionary in Nova Scotia; Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in the Cape Colony; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in New South Wales; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a journalist in Upper Canada; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in New Zealand. The project will analyse their connection to a denominational network, uncovering the hitherto neglected history of the Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches in the British Empire.

You can read Mikki and Valerie’s thoughts on their time as Visiting Fellows here in St Andrews on the School of History blog: ISHR Visiting Fellows – A Look Back


2014 -15

The 2014-15 ISHR Visiting Research Fellowship has been awarded to Professor Paul Pickering, Director of the Research School of the Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra. Professor Pickering is an historian of Britain, Ireland and Australia and is interested in political and cultural history, biography, public memory and commemoration, and the study of re-enactment as an historical method. He has written and edited books including Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (2010); Feargus O’Connor: A Political Life (2008); Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform(2007); Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2004); Friends of the People: The Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (2002); and The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (2000).

While with the ISHR, Professor Pickering will be working on a project called Lives in Two Hemispheres: A Group Biography of Scottish Radicals in Colonial Australia. This project will consider a group of Scottish migrants who made a sustained contribution to Australia’s political development in the middle of the nineteenth century, including John Dunmore Lang, Australia’s first republican and an outspoken supporter of self-government, democratic reform and separation from the ‘Mother Country’. During his long career, Lang made nine return trips to Britain to promote immigration schemes to Australia. Lang is one of six radicals and reformers at the heart of the project. The others are: Ebenezer Syme; Charles Jardine Don; George Edward Thomson; David Buchanan; and James Service.

Professor Pickering will present his research to staff and postgraduate students in the ISHR and the School of History during his fellowship in St Andrews.


2013 -14

In 2013-14 the ISHR nominated its first ISHR Visiting Research Fellow, Prof. Elizabeth Ewan of the University of Guelph. Prof. Ewan visited St Andrews in early 2014 and worked on two manuscripts. The first was a biographical study of a late medieval Edinburgh woman, Alison Rough, executed for murder in 1535; and the second was a study of gender and interpersonal assault in Scottish towns c.1450-1600. Prof. Ewan also carried out primary source research on forms of masculinity in late medieval/early modern Scotland. In addition, she used the rich resources of the St Andrews University Special Collections for a chapter on social life in St Andrews in the Middle Ages, a contribution to a new volume on the history of medieval St Andrews.  Prof. Ewan is also organised a workshop on Scottish gender history on 14 March 2014.