Cassandra Potts Hannahs

Cassandra Potts Hannahs is a historian with special expertise in Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Norman studies. She has enjoyed traveling with Smithsonian Journeys on more than 50 tours and cruises, sharing her passion and knowledge of Great Britain, France, and Ireland.

With a Ph.D. in medieval history, she was a tenured professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she taught courses on a wide range of subjects, from ancient history through the Reformation.  A Fulbright scholar and recipient of several grants, she has also spent considerable time living in France pursuing research.  Her publications include a book exploring the Viking settlement of Normandy in northern France during the 10th and 11th centuries, and the revival of monasticism that took place as the new rulers encouraged monks to return to the region after the Viking raids. 

In her research and lectures, Cassandra explores the cultural and political exchanges that have historically linked Britain, France, Ireland, and Scandinavia. She looks forward to sharing her love and knowledge of these lands, their history, music, and literature, with Smithsonian Journeys travelers.

Neil McGuigan

Neil McGuigan is a historian of the Early Middle Ages, with particular interest in the period prior to 1300. He has taught on numerous subjects, including Scottish and English history, the medieval Mediterranean, and the evolution of 'Great Ideas' in Western civilization. With master's degrees in History and Scottish History from the University of Edinburgh, he is currently a tutor in Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. Neil's research has concentrated on the early Scottish kingdom(s), on Northumbria, and on the evolution of the Anglo-Scottish border, and he has recently written on the political nature of Viking-Age mythology.

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.

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.

Jennifer Paxton

Jennifer Paxton has taught the history of the British Isles and Ireland for the past seventeen years, first at Georgetown and then at the Catholic University of America, where she is currently the director of the University Honors Program. She earned her B.A. in history at Yale and her Ph.D. in medieval history at Harvard, where she also did course work in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. Dr. Paxton has produced a 24-lecture series for The Great Courses entitled "The Celtic World". She lectures regularly on Irish, Scottish, and British history for Smithsonian Associates.

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.