ECA - Key Persons
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- History of Art
- Postgraduate Student Profile Anne Regina Grasselli
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- Parametric Architecture and Islamic / Arabic Calligraphy
- Postgraduate Student Profile Bassam Al Shiekh
- Researcher in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh
Bassam Al Shiekh is currently a PhD researcher in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. He has a long-term intention to pursue a dual career in both academic and professional aspects in Architecture and Urban Design. This intention is based on the premise and the conviction that those aspects can be better served when combined and complemented. He also holds a Master degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association (AA) in London where he completed the Design Research Laboratory (DRL), which is an internationally recognised post-professional design programme. In addition to his experience as an architectural educator and researcher, Bassam has specialised in Architecture, Urban Design and Placemaking with national and international experience working in the UK and the Middle East with over 10 years of experience. He has worked on high profile internationally renowned and award winning projects for a number of architecture firms, including Zaha Hadid Architects in London and other firms in the UK and the Middle East, where he has challenged the boundaries of any given brief to produce progressive, forward-thinking architecture and urban design projects. He has participated in several prize-winning design competitions as a Design Team Leader and as a Principal Participant. He is interested in all aspects of design throughout the process and strives to create creative and refined solutions to complex architecture and urban challenges through collaborative design.
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- Head of Subject Area - Music
- History of Art
Carol M Richardson specialises in institutional patronage, particularly that of the Early Modern period. Her research to date has been primarily concerned with the papal city, Rome, and the ways in which the patronage of individuals combine to create corporate identity. A particular feature in all things Roman is the embeddedness of the long history of the city in the works of art and architecture created there.
Being a native Scot, Carol took both her degrees close to home, at the University of St Andrews. She went on to teach at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and The Open University in Milton Keynes, moving to Edinburgh in 2012. She is passionate about the History of Art as the ultimate interdisciplinary subject area, which makes it both inclusive and challenging. She believes it is an antidote to media attention on global crisis and humanity's inhumanity as art often emerges from, comments on, sometimes resolves and almost always atones for some of our worst actions.
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Dan Castro
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- Postgraduate Student Profile David Coney
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- Postgraduate Student Profile David Gerrard
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Dean Chalmers
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- Director Internationalisation
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- Professional Services Staff Profile Becca Hasler
Catriona Murray is a historian of early modern British visual and material culture. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and propaganda during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, she is interested in the exchanges between ruler and subject, exploring how images of authority were promoted and received.
Her first monograph, Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity (2016), explores the promotion of familial propaganda under the Stuarts. Bringing together royal ritual, court portraiture and popular prints, it argues that dynastic and domestic representations were strategically developed to endorse political agendas. Imaging Stuart Family Politics was awarded the 2017 Royal Studies Journal Book Prize. In January 2020, Catriona took up a Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship to develop a new research programme. This project considers the Stuarts' involved relationship with the monumental image, analysing how sculpture served to mediate royal authority, public loyalty and political opposition. In January 2023, she was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Fellowship to support the completion of her second monograph, Figuring Stuart Monarchy: Monumental Sculpture and the Royal Image, 1603-1819. Catriona has published widely on topics from seventeenth-century funeral effigies to nineteenth-century historiography.
Catriona joined the department as Lecturer in 2015. Originally from Aberdeen, she moved to Edinburgh to study for the MA in Fine Art, before pursuing a Masters and PhD in History of Art. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Institute of Historical Research (University of London); the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh); the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the Henry Moore Foundation; the Huntington Library and Art Museum; Funds for Women Graduates and the AHRC. Catriona has developed close working relationships and collaborations with a number of UK museums and galleries and is currently academic advisor to the National Galleries of Scotland's research project on King James VI and I. She is also co-investigator on John Michael Wright and the Art of Invention. Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, this collaborative research project, also with the National Galleries of Scotland, adopts a new perspective on this remarkable artist, analysing the complex political, religious and cultural networks in which he operated under the later Stuarts. Catriona is a founding member of the Material Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Research Cluster, which hosts seminars, conferences and special events throughout the year.
Catriona's teaching is directly influenced by her research and introduces students to key issues in the relationships between art, politics and society in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Her third-year special options course, Picturing Authority: Art and Politics at the Tudor and Stuart Courts, explores the visual representation of power through close study of royal portraiture, decorative schemes, public statuary, printed ephemera and court spectacle.
Her fourth-year special options course, Cradle to Grave: Art and Society in Britain from Holbein to Hogarth, examines the representation of gender, the life cycle, religion, status and nationality across a range of media, assessing how early modern men and women defined their social relationships and fashioned their identities.
She also lectures on Northern Renaissance and Baroque art for History of Art 1 and contributes to the department's team-taught Honours and MSc courses.
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- Learning & IT Services Manager
- Professional Services Staff Profile Dr Francine Shields
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- Fellow at the Reid School of Music
Gareth Williams is a Chancellor's Fellow at the Reid School of Music, since 2014. His compositions seek to find new participants, collaborators and audiences for new opera and music theatre, to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, and to explore ideas of vulnerability in vocal writing.
Williams has created work for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Opera, Tapestry Opera, the Red Note Ensemble, The Gaspard Piano Trio, the Maxwell Quartet, and many others. His work has been frequently performed and discussed on television and radio, and he regularly presents and discusses new classical music on Classics Unwrapped on BBC Radio Scotland for a wide audience. The venues for his operas are often new territory for musical performance and include lighthouses, barns, distilleries and community halls.
He was Composer in Residence at Scottish Opera from 2011 to 2014. During this time, Williams created a series of operas and projects, including ‘Breath Cycle', at the respiratory ward of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, where he wrote songs, ensemble pieces, and opera specifically for patients with Cystic Fibrosis, who weren't allowed in the same room as one another. Breath Cycle was nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Award in 2015. (www.breathcycle.co.uk)
He has created three operas for NOISE Opera since 2012, each one bringing a new collaborator to the genre, from the patrons of Glasgow's oldest bar, Shetland fiddler, Chris Stout, and the indie band, Admiral Fallow. (www.noiseopera.com)
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- Director of External Engagement
Jonathan Murray studied at the University of Glasgow, where he completed an undergraduate MA and PhD in Film and Television Studies and Scottish History. Jonathan also taught briefly at the University of Glasgow before taking up a post as Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art in August 2003.
Since working at Edinburgh College of Art, Jonathan's major research interests have lain in the field of contemporary Scottish and British cinemas and popular culture. In addition to a range of articles published in various peer-reviewed journals and scholarly anthologies, he is the editor (with Rod Stoneman and Fidelma Farley) of Scottish Cinema Now (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and (with Nea Ehrlich) of Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He is also the author of the monographs Discomfort and Joy: the Cinema of Bill Forsyth (Peter Lang, 2011) and The New Scottish Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015). He is the former co-editor (with Maureen Furness) of Animation Journal and of the journal Visual Culture in Britain (Taylor & Francis) and current co-Principal Editor of Journal of British Cinema and Television (Edinburgh University Press). Jonathan is a Contributing Writer on the staff of Cineaste, America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, and he also works regularly with or at film festivals in Scotland (the Edinburgh International Film Festival) and overseas (Thessaloniki International Film Festival, the Varna World Festival of Animated Film).
Jonathan's teaching at Edinburgh College of Art predominantly focuses on moving image history and theory. He runs and contributes to a number of undergraduate short courses in this field, including Contemporary Cinema.
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- Director of Research Innovation
- Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Theory and History of Art
Kamini Vellodi is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Theory and History of Art in the School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. After completing an MA Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, she received her PhD in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) in 2012.
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- History of Art
- Lecturer in Pre
Dr Megan C. McNamee is Lecturer in Pre-Modern Art, 500 to 1500, specialising in medieval Europe. Although McNamee's interests range over the whole of the middle ages, they coalesce around questions of form, style, transmedial effects and the interplay of intellectual and material culture. She is guided by a curiosity about the ways that people-in the past and today-understand and articulate the physical world, and how, in turn, the world shapes human actions and ideas. Her research and teaching consider medieval numeracy, tablet weaving and late-medieval practices of folding.
McNamee's work has been supported by The British Academy, The Leverhulme Trust, A. W. Mellon Foundation, American Philosophical Society and Kress Foundation. She has held long-term fellowships at the Warburg Institute, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and is a founding member of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
McNamee obtained her BA from Wellesley College, MA from the Courtauld and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before pursuing a PhD, she worked as an artist's assistant and spent summers excavating at Villa Magna, Lazio in Italy.
Dr McNamee's teaching is tied to her research and draws on her expertise in the study of premodern books. Her approach to art history is informed by curatorial and archaeological experience, artistic practice and strong ties to the history of science. She incorporates local collections and includes opportunities for hands-on engagement with artefacts, materials and artisanal tools wherever possible. The emphasis is on primary sources.
McNamee currently offers two honours options: Picturing Science in Premodern Manuscripts and Printed Books (3rd year) and The Optics of Devotion: Sight, Light and Experiencing the Divine in Medieval Europe (4th year). She also contributes lectures on Ottonian/Year-1000 art, the Romanesque, abstraction, formalism and curating medieval objects to core courses.
Dr McNamee's current research examines the extent to which a shared belief in number's elemental status throughout the middle ages inflected how people perceived and interacted with the material world. She is completing a monograph that reconstructs numeric study in Europe around the year 1000, and traces the effects of widespread numeracy on representation, especially in religious contexts. A forthcoming essay analyses the mechanics and materiality of the number-filled grids of Boethius's On Arithmetic, and an article in progress focuses on tablet weaving, a loomless technique that offers rare insight into the ways that women put quantitative concepts to work.
McNamee is leading a new collaborative project devoted to concertina-fold almanacs. United by their distinctive construction and almost entirely pictorial content, these manuscripts form a standalone group. The project, funded by The British Academy's Neil Ker Memorial Fund, will catalogue and virtually visualise the twenty-one surviving examples. Investigators seek to understand how this unusual book type functioned and developed and, more broadly, what it tells us about time.
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- Head of Student Administration and Support Service
Dr Nichola Dobson is a leading scholar in Animation Studies. Between 2015 and 2019 she was the President of the Society for Animation Studies promoting scholarship around theory and practice in Animation. Founding editor of the online, peer reviewed journal, Animation Studies (2006 - 2011) and Animation Studies 2.0 (2012- present), she has published widely on animation, television genre and fan fiction, including Norman McLaren: Between the Frames (2018) for Bloomsbury, The Animation Studies Reader (co-ed and authored, Bloomsbury 2018) and both Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons (2009) and Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons (2nd Edition 2020) for Scarecrow Press. She is currently working on a book on TV animation with Paul Ward for Edinburgh University Press. She gained her PhD at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh in 2004, organised and chaired the 2010 Society for Animation Studies annual conference and has worked at Edinburgh College of Art since 2010.
She has presented keynote addresses at numerous conferences and events both internationally, focusing on the large project on Scottish Animator Norman McLaren.
She recently founded the Animation Research Network Scotland to promote collaboration in animation related research in Scotland and beyond.
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- Director of Talbot Rice Gallery
Fionnuala Doran is an Irish artist, living and working in Scotland. She graduated with an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art in 2015 and lectures in Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art.
Winner of the 2014 Comics Unmasked competition at the British Library, she has worked between fine art and comics, acting as a director of Catalyst Arts, Belfast's foremost artist-led gallery, and as co-editor of Modern Times, Britain's first magazine of graphic journalism since the 19th Century.
She has participated in residencies with the Banff Centre, Canada, the European Exchange Academy, Turkey and the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, Florida. She came down with a bad case of comic-fever in 1990 and has never recovered.
The nucleus of Doran's work is drawing; they use it as a means to clarify ideas, as a form of research, as an outcome and a framework by which to interpret their diverse research interests.
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- Head of Engagement & Communications
- Professional Services Staff Profile Geoff Lee
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Graeme Stephen
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- De - Framing Time and Space: towards a Kineiconic Application of 360° Immersive Technologies in the Reconstruction of Memory
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Hayley Jenkins
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Huiling Chen
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Huw Keene
Huw Keene is a PhD Candidate in Music and History of Art, funded by the Edinburgh Doctoral College Scholarship for Edinburgh College of Art. His research examines music-image-word relations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, specifically within the context of manuscript culture. Huw has been awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship by the Historians of Netherlandish Art, a research grant by Cleveland Museum of Art, a travel grant by the British Archaeological Association and a research award by the Friends of Saint Cecilia's Hall to support this research.
Prior to his doctoral research, Huw completed his MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art with Distinction. His dissertation, supervised by Professor Susie Nash, explored the roles and meanings of images throughout the Alamire Choirbooks. He completed his MA (Hons) at the University of Edinburgh with First-Class Honours and received the Huntley MacDonald Sinclair Prize for Best History of Art Dissertation.
Huw has worked in a number of roles across the museum and publishing sectors, including positions at the Barbican Art Gallery, the Science Museum, Jupiter Art Land, the Witt and Conway Libraries and Yale University Press. Most recently, Huw worked in community management at TikTok, and he continues to explore new strategies for the dissemination of research through social media.
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- Professional Services Staff Profile Jacqueline Hay
- Student Representation / ECA Undergraduate School
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Liam Clark
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- Postgraduate Student Profile Liang WU
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- Postgraduate Research School Convenor
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- History of Art
- Postgraduate Student Profile Madeleine Reynolds
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- Director of Quality Assurance & Curriculum Approval
Molly Ailsa Ingham is a first-year History of Art PhD Candidate funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her project is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with National Museums Scotland (NMS) which examines religious material culture produced and used in the centuries following the Scottish Protestant Reformation. Using objects from the NMS collection associated with the practice and performance of religious belief, this research will investigate how material culture can present a more complex picture of religious life in post-Reformation Scotland and complicate traditional narratives of the long association of kirk, state, and national identity.
Molly studied an MA in International Cultural Heritage Management at Durham University in 2020/21. Her dissertation investigated visitor experience in relation to digital heritage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this, she completed a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, receiving a First-Class Honours (with Distinction).
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- Director of Education
- Co - Ordinator of Adjustments
- Professional Services Staff Profile Olwen Gorie
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- Director of Professional Services
- Professor of Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh
John Lee is Professor of Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh. He has been Deputy Director of the Human Communication Research Centre since 1993. He has directed the highly successful MSc programme in Design and Digital Media since it was founded in 1999.
He has held a number of externally funded research projects, and coordinated the Edinburgh-Stanford Link programme, a collaboration on speech and language technology with Stanford University, USA. Much of his research centres on various aspects of cognition, communication and uses of technology in design and learning.
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- Head of Subject Area - History of Art
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- Head of Subject Area - Design