Roff Smith

Roff Smith originally trained as a geologist and archaeologist but preferred the world of storytelling to that of science or academia. Over the course of a thirty-year career as a writer and photographer he has covered science, history archaeological stories all over the world winning numerous awards along the way, most recently a British Archaeological Award for his coverage of discoveries made beneath the streets of London during major construction projects. He has a particular interest in Neolithic Britain and has spent several field seasons in Scotland's remote Orkney Islands following the on-going excavation of the 5000 year-old walled temple complex at the Ness of Brodgar - the discovery of which is presently rewriting British prehistory.

            As a lover of literature, he taught himself Old Norse in order to be able to read the Viking sagas in their original language and earned a masters degree in mediaeval history while attending the University of Sydney. He has travelled widely throughout Britain, visited every county, often travelling by bicycle - cycling the length of Hadrian's Wall, exploring Orkney, Shetland and the Outer Hebrides and travelling across the Scottish Highlands following the route taken by Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Kidnapped. An Australian, he now lives in Hastings, an old seaside town on the Sussex Coast, with his English wife and two daughters.

Rab Houston

Professor Rab Houston was an undergraduate at St Andrews and, after six years in Cambridge as a research student and research fellow, came back as a lecturer in Modern History in 1983. He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Adelaide and Erasmus, Rotterdam as well as visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Between 2006 and 2009 he held a prestigious Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Member of the Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Rab has written ten books, co-authored one, and edited another four as well as authoring eighty articles and book chapters, most of them in the fields of early modern British and European literacy, British demography and urbanisation, Scottish society, and the history of mental abnormality.

Outside academia Rab is a keen scuba diver, often to be seen diving wrecks off the east coast of Scotland – or visiting warmer waters around the world. He enjoys yoga and Tai Chi, both active forms of meditation.

Katherine Forsyth

Katherine Forsyth grew up in the north-east of Scotland where she developed a fascination with the early medieval inhabitants of the region – the Picts – and their remarkable stone sculptures. She pursued this interest at the University of Cambridge, and then Harvard University, where she gained a PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures. After research fellowships at the University of Oxford and University College London, she moved to the University of Glasgow’s department of Celtic and Gaelic, where she has taught since 1998. Katherine has published extensively on various aspects of Pictish studies and on sculpture in Scotland and Ireland, having conducted field-work there and in the Isle of Man and Brittany. She has particular expertise in the field of inscriptions, and her current research interests include the relationships between stone monuments, landscape and memory, and an inter-disciplinary study of Celtic board-games. Katherine has acted as academic consultant on the display of early medieval sculpture at a number of sites, including Iona, and worked with contemporary artists who seek to engage with Scotland’s ancient art. When she’s not thinking about old stones she likes to dance Argentine Tango.