Professor Dorothy Miell, Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science, issued the following announcement on 17 September 2013:

"Following a recent interview process I am pleased to announce that we have now appointed to the role of Director of IASH. With effect from 1st January 2014, for a three year term  in the first instance, Professor Jo Shaw will be the Director of IASH.  Professor Jolyon Mitchell will be taking up a role as Academic Director in IASH. Professor Mitchell will continue in the role of Acting Director until the end of December 2013."

Professor Karen Beckwith, Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, has been appointed as the next Fulbright-Scotland Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. She will be in Edinburgh for six months from January 2014 and will be a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Professor Beckwith will be working on her research project: "What's New? Institutional Transformation and Women's Political Representation" and collaborating with colleagues in the School of Social and Political Science.

Peter Fosl is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Transylvania University, Kentucky.

He is at IASH as the 2013-14 David Hume Fellow and is working on "The Promise of Philosophy: Skepticism and Naturalism in Hume"

Dr. Abbie Garrington (Postdoctoral Fellow 2007-8) is a lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a book: High Modernism: A Literary History of Mountaineering, 1890-1945. Her book Haptic Modernism was published earlier this year by Edinburgh University Press (see http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748641741).

Dr Martyn Pickersgill, former IASH Newby Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, has been awarded funds from the Leverhulme Trust for a new 2-year project on ‘Neuroscience and Family Life: The Brain in Policy and Practice’. Martyn is currently Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Ethics in the Centre for Population Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh.

Following his Fellowship at IASH, Dr. Marco Bernini (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-12) has taken up a two-year Junior Research Fellowship in the English Studies Department at the University of Durham (2012-2014). His co-authored book on Literature and Cognitive Science has just been published (in italian) (original title: Letteratura e Scienze Cognitive) – see:

A new opera by Stuart MacRae (Edinburgh Festival Creative Fellow, 2005-6) was premiered at the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival. Ghost Patrol with libretto by Louise Welsh was commissioned and produced by Scottish Opera and has since been performed in Glasgow, as well as being toured extensively in England and Wales. It won the 2013 South Bank Sky Arts Award for opera, beating off competition from the Royal Opera House’s production of Les Troyens and the Barbican’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Congratulations to Dr. David Manning (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-12) on his appointment as a lecturer in History at the University of Stirling from February 2013.

Professor Desmond Bell (Visiting Research Fellow 2008 and 2010-11) is currently Head of Research at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.  He is also Visiting Research Professor in History and Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast

Dr. Seiichi Suzuki (Visiting Research Fellow 1994-5) is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, for 2012-13, working on a book entitled The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry.