Dawn Leslie (Chair) is a Lecturer in Language & Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen. Her research is centred on language attitudes and perceptions of linguistic variation and change among minority language communities (focusing mostly on Scots) and, more recently, on the efficacy of Artificial Intelligence tools when creating content in so-called ‘low resource’ languages. In 2022, she collaborated with colleague, Prof. Michelle Macleod, as Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC Future of Language Research scoping project to conduct wider research on the challenges faced by current minority language stakeholders. She is a founding member of the Aberlangs team at the University of Aberdeen: a research collective which seeks to explore issues of multilingualism in the region. She is also a regular Scots columnist for the Press & Journal newspaper.
Christine Elsweiler (Secretary) is a lecturer at the University of Innsbruck. She received her PhD from the University of Erlangen in 2009. In 2019 she completed her habilitation project entitled “From Shared Meaning to Divergent Pragmatics: A Comparative Study of the Modal Auxiliaries May, Can, Shall and Will in Scottish and English Letters (1500–1700)”. Her research covers language variation and change in different historical periods of English, from early Middle English up to Late Modern English. She specialises in Scots and its historical stages, also from a comparative perspective with other varieties of English, focussing in particular on the intersection between Historical Pragmatics and Historical Sociolinguistics.
Megan Bushnell is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistic data based at the University of Oxford. Megan has a background in medieval literature, classics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities and has a special interest in computational approaches to analysing Older Scots literary texts. Her past work has focused on Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513). Learn more at https://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/people/megan-bushnell.
Petra Johana Poncarová is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Glasgow, working on a research project that explores twentieth-century Gaelic magazines. She serves as secretary of the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures and as one of the co-directors of Ionad Eòghainn MhicLachlainn | National Centre for Gaelic Translation. She was the manager of the 3rd World Congress of Scottish Literatures (Prague, 2022). Her monograph Derick Thomson and the Gaelic Revival was published in 2024 (Edinburgh University Press), and her edition of Derick Thomson’s Gaelic prose came out in 2025 (Acair). She has an interest in the connections and interactions between Gaelic and Scots.
Frank Ferguson is is the Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at Ulster University. As part of his directorship, he leads a number of ongoing academic and community projects, such as the Ulster-Scots Education Project and the Ulster Poetry Project. His research interests include: Ulster and Scottish writing, literary diaspora studies, Scotch-Irish literature and culture, Irish and British book history and the study of the Romantic period ballad in Britain and Ireland. He has written and edited a number of significant texts on Ulster-Scottish literature. Awarded a Distinguished Research Fellowship in 2014, his work on Ulster-Scots writing and book history has been recognised as internationally excellent.
Janet Cruickshank – Treasurer
FRLSU 