Speakers | Edinburgh 2026
Discover who will be speaking and presenting at our upcoming 18th European Alum Symposium, which will be held on November 6-8, 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland!
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A'mara Braynen '22
Postgraduate Student
A’mara (they/she) has been memory-keeping since she was little. Today, Pinterest boards, zines, and music playlists serve as scrapbooks. She values using art to understand history, with a sweet spot for Black vernacular photography and fiber art traditions of remembrance.
They graduated Magna Cum Laude from Mount Holyoke College in 2022, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies and Psychology with a concentration in Black Feminisms. Her personal desires, to discover, remember, and archive the ebbs and flows of black femme personhood and self-definition, led to their acceptance into the University of Edinburgh's Collections and Curating Practices MScR this Fall semester.
A creative, a sister in both the familial and platonic sense of the term, and a nostalgic tender-hearted soul, the substance of their work is rooted in a place that’s deeply spiritual, ancestral, and sanguine. As a queer Black feminist and art historian in the making, Baldwin's prose, Audre Lorde and June Jordan's poetics, and Morrison's literary wisdom inform her own study of creative traditions involved in Black collective memory-making from a transatlantic, intersectional, and diasporic point of view.
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Sylvia Cifuentes
Assistant Professor of Environmental and Social Equity and Justice
Sylvia Cifuentes is an Assistant Professor of Environmental and Social Equity and Justice at Mount Holyoke College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who investigates the connections among Indigenous politics and global environmental challenges, including climate change, ‘Smart Earth’ technologies and energy—with a geographical focus on Amazonia. She draws from critical geography, science and technology studies, and decolonial and Indigenous studies.
As such, she has co-edited the book "Multispecies Climate Justice: Liberatory Futures for Human and More-Than-Human Worlds," published by Springer; and her research has also been published in Science, Technology and Human Values, the Journal of Latin American Geography, Digital Geography and Society, Climatic Change, among other venues.
Cifuentes is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Technologies for Worlds Otherwise: Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Climate Futures in Amazonia," which analyzes how Indigenous knowledges and politics shape climate initiatives involving ancestral, political, solar and digital technologies in Amazonia.
At Mount Holyoke, her teaching therefore builds from global and intersectional perspectives in courses including Global Environmental Justice; Climate Humanities, Futures, and Activism; and Indigenous and Decolonial Ecologies. Both as part of her research and prior to academia, she has collaborated with several Indigenous and environmental organizations.
Professor Marguerite Dupree '72
Professor of Social and Medical History (emerita)
Born and educated first in the USA at Mount Holyoke College ’72, where she graduated summa cum laude, with a double major in Biological Sciences and History, Marguerite Dupree completed the first two years of the graduate programme in History at Princeton University before completing a DPhil in Modern History at Nuffield College, Oxford University. She has spent her career in Britain, holding Research Fellowships at Emmanuel and Wolfson Colleges in Cambridge (where she is an emeritus Fellow). Ultimately, she became Professor of Social and Medical History (now emerita) at Glasgow University.
She is editor of Lancashire and Whitehall: The Diary of Sir Raymond Street 1931-57, 2 vols (Manchester, 1987), author of Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries 1840-1880 (Oxford, 1995), co-author of Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (Cambridge, 2010); co-editor of Germs and Governance: The Past, Present and Future of Hospital Infection, Prevention and Control (Manchester, 2021). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Science.
Currently, she is an Associate Member of the Oxford University History Faculty and President (2025-26) of the History of Medicine Society of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Dr Alice Earley
Research Associate
Dr Alice Earley is a Research Associate at the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) in the Division of Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, a Tutor in Urban Studies, Public Policy and Qualitative Research Methods and a Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow.
She has an interdisciplinary background in urban studies, public and urban policy, planning and geography. Before returning to study for her MRes and PhD at the University of Glasgow, she worked for several years in economic development, regeneration and public policy research and consultancy in both Scotland and England.
She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Glasgow, entitled Community enterprises, community assets and processes of urban regeneration and gentrification; an MRes in Urban Research, also from the University of Glasgow; an MSc in Urban Regeneration from the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL; and an MA (Hons) in Geography from the University of Edinburgh. While studying for her PhD, Alice also worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Social and Public Policy and completed an internship in Public Service Reform at the Scottish Government.
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Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston
Filmmaker
Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston is an award-winning, Edinburgh-based, Sri Lankan-born visual storyteller. She uses photography and filmmaking to tell stories about our shared humanity with migrants and ‘others’.
Her work in South Asia has focused on refugees, militant groups, and women who have experienced self-harm and abuse. She currently works with the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention to translate academic work on self-harm to broader audiences.
In Scotland, she has collaborated with migrant women’s groups, women coming to terms with cancer and their loss of identity, and with institutions such as the Scottish Prison Service, the Glasgow Modern Art Gallery, and Historic Scotland. She develops collaborative art through exhibitions and workshops that explore anger, shame, and identity, revealing hidden and visible scars.
Head of Stakeholder Relations
Dr Patricia Erskine is Head of Stakeholder Relations for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Head of Culture & Community with Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. She supports engagement projects across the College and manages strategic partnerships with Edinburgh’s festivals and cultural organisations.
Patricia has been involved with Edinburgh Futures Institute since the early days of its development. She now leads a small team to engage the public with its mission to tackle today’s increasingly complex issues by bringing people and disciplines together in our futures-focused space for learning, research, and innovation.
Following industrial research in the energy sector, Patricia came to Scotland to lecture in Chemical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University before a brief spell at Scottish Enterprise which included working in “The Workplace of the Future”. She joined the University of Edinburgh first to work in the College of Science and Engineering, before moving to Arts and Humanities and is happy to work closely with colleagues across disciplines in a future-inspired workplace once again.
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Liz Fenwick '85
Dubbed ’the queen of the contemporary Cornish novel’ by The Guardian, Liz Fenwick is the award-winning writer of eleven novels and two novellas which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her latest work is Flora’s Day and her ninth novel, a WW2 story - The Secret Shore - has been optioned for a film. Although an English major at MHC, she didn’t begin writing in earnest until her forties and her debut, The Cornish House was published when she was forty-nine. When not writing and researching, she runs writing workshops, plot walks, and procrastinates. She lives in Cornwall with her husband and two mad cats.
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Dr Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
Associate Professor of History
Dr Desmond Fitz-Gibbon is an Associate Professor of modern European history. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and began teaching at Mount Holyoke in 2012. Both his research and teaching revolve around questions of economic life in the modern world, and the way that commercial practices are shaped by cultural and social relations.
His first book, "Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain," explored how the British organized a market for real estate while debating the meaning of property as a social, political, and cultural institution.
He teaches a range of courses on the history of shopping, money, urban life, energy, and modern capitalism, as well as a popular first year seminar on the history of Jack the Ripper and Victorian London.
In 2025, he received the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Teaching. He has also recently Chaired both the Department of History and the College’s NEXUS program in Museums, Archives, and Public History.
Dr Katy Gavin
Post-Excavation Project Officer
Katy Gavin is a Post-Excavation Project Officer at Headland Archaeology. She completed her PhD, The Quarries of Hadrian’s Wall, at the University of Edinburgh in 2020.
Her doctoral research involved mapping the potential stone sources of Hadrian’s Wall using QGIS and applying analytical techniques including X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and petrographic thin-section analysis to investigate the provenance of the stone used in one of the Roman Empire’s most significant engineering achievements and the largest stone-built monument in Roman Britain.
In her current role, Katy specialises in the analysis, interpretation, and publication of archaeological excavations, drawing together excavation results, specialist reports, and material evidence to produce archaeological reports and publications.
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Researcher and Public Archaeologist
Originally based in Canada, I studied Fine Arts and Art History at Langara College in Vancouver, B.C., before completing a BA in History and Humanities and a BGS in Museum Studies and Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. I later earned an MSc in Classical Archaeology from the University of Edinburgh. I recently submitted my doctoral thesis in Classics at the University of St Andrews. My research examines monumental Aegyptiaca—Egyptianising material culture—in Greek urban environments during the Hellenistic period.
For four years I collaborated with the University of Edinburgh on the Aeclanum excavation in southern Italy under Professor Ben Russell, serving as Project Manager, Public Outreach Coordinator, and Programme Secretary.
Alongside my research, I have worked on excavations in Italy, Greece and Spain. From 2017 to 2019, I collaborated with the University of Edinburgh on the Aeclanum excavation in southern Italy under Professor Ben Russell, serving as a Project Manager, Public Outreach Coordinator, and Programme Secretary.
In 2020, I launched the academic public outreach podcast, Two Friends Talk History. I currently collaborate with colleagues at the University of St Andrews as a producer and sound editor on several academic podcasts, including Visualising War and Peace (with Professor Alice König), Ukraine Russia War Talk (with Professor Phillips O’Brien), and Mountain Stories / Mountain Futures (with Professor Jason König), as well as a forthcoming series on Communism and Classics with Dr Henry Stead.
Alongside my academic work, I freelance as an artist, producing historically informed illustrations for academic publications, digital creators, and personal projects.
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Independent Journalist /Science Writer
Heather Hansen is a journalist and naturalist whose work has appeared in publications around the world. She often writes and speaks on topics at the intersection of people, places and science.
Heather is the award-winning author of several books: Walking Great Britain (Mountaineers Books); Wildfire: On the Front Lines with Station 8 (Mountaineers Books); Prophets and Moguls, Rangers and Rogues, Bison and Bears: 100 Years of the National Park Service (Mountaineers Books), and co-author of Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone (Cambridge University Press) and Disappearing Destinations (Vintage).
A born explorer, she’s logged thousands of miles across the US and around the UK, and in South America and sub-Saharan Africa. Her favorite places to roam are Colorado’s Rocky Mountains and the wild moors and coastlines of England, Scotland and Wales.
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Middle School Science Teacher
Raised in the New Jersey Meadowlands, I grew up where tidal wetlands, migrating birds and people, cargo ships, railways, and highways coexisted in a constantly changing exurban landscape. Those early experiences sparked a lifelong curiosity about how places shape people and how people, in turn, shape the places they call home.
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (Class of 1999) with a major in Geography and a minor in Geology, I later earned graduate degrees in City and Regional Planning and then Education. My teaching career has taken me from New Jersey to Tokyo and, since 2007, to TASIS England, where I have taught science, history, STEM, and served as the Middle School Pastoral Coordinator.
My passion is cultivating habits of attention in my students and myself that reconnect us to the present moment, the expansiveness of geologic time, the wonder within the environments we inhabit, and the relationships that foster our sense of belonging. I believe intentionally slowing down to separate observation from inference helps us be curious about the natural and human-shaped worlds and that by broadening our perspective from the present moment to geologic time, we can navigate an increasingly complex world with greater resilience and compassion.
Ultimately, my hope is that by developing my own skills and those of my students, I am creating a space and place where each individual feels empowered to create positive change in their own lives, in the landscapes, and in the communities we share. I am very excited to collaborate with the author and fellow MHC alum Heather Hansen '94 for the 2026 MHC European Symposium.
President Danielle R. Holley
President of Mount Holyoke College
Serving as the 20th President of the College, Danielle is a renowned legal scholar and educator. Prior to joining MHC, she was Dean of the School of Law at Howard University and a law clerk to Judge Carl E. Stewart on the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
She is an expert on a wide range of civil rights and equity subjects, including desegregation, racial discrimination and affirmative action, the history of the civil rights movement, diversifying K-12 pipelines to higher education, the admission of undocumented immigrants to public colleges and universities, women in academic leadership and reproductive rights.
She is a leading scholar of the Supreme Court decisions regarding race-conscious college and university admissions.
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Rabbi Professor Deborah Kahn-Harris '89
Principal, Leo Baeck College
Rabbi Professor Deborah Kahn-Harris serves as the Principal of Leo Baeck College in London since 2011. Raised in Houston, Texas, she completed her BA in Art at Mount Holyoke College in 1989. She continued her studies at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies before entering the rabbinical training programme at Leo Baeck College. Ordained in 1996, she subsequently worked for the Movement for Reform Judaism as a university chaplain, building up student and young adult work. In 2001 she departed to live in Jerusalem for a year, where she taught on several programmes, followed by a stinit working at Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne, Australia. Upon her return to the UK her working life was divided between serving on the rabbinic team at Sha’arei Tsedek Reform Synagogue, teaching at Leo Baeck College, working on a PhD in Bible at the University of Sheffield, and lecturing in Bible and Jewish Studies at SOAS. She has published numerous academic book chapters and articles. Her 1st monograph, Polyamory and Reading the Book of Ruth, was published in 2023. She is married to sociologist, Dr Keith Kahn-Harris, with whom she has two young adult children.
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Elizabeth Keach '07
Regenerative Supply-Chain Researcher, Consultant, and Mother
Elizabeth Keach is a sustainability practitioner and researcher working at the intersection of regenerative agriculture, biodiversity, and fashion supply chains.
Drawing on a master’s degree in Sustainability Leadership from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, she focuses on how land-use decisions and fibre sourcing can support both ecological integrity and dignified livelihoods across global supply chains.
Her current work explores what it would mean for brands and retailers to move beyond compliance-driven metrics towards listening‑led, place-based approaches to biodiversity and farmer wellbeing, with a particular interest in high-end natural fibres such as wool and cashmere. She is especially interested in how monitoring technologies and data platforms can either constrain or enable autonomy, voice, and self-determination for farmers and local communities.
Elizabeth lives in London and co-hosts a regular Mother + Child gathering that experiments, at a very human scale, with practices of care, shared food, and collective learning. Across her work, she is motivated by a simple question: how can the tools of sustainability—metrics, standards, and strategies—be reoriented to serve the people and places they measure, rather than the other way around?
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Program Manager
Dr Emilyann Nault is the Program Manager at the University of Edinburgh’s Move-R Lab, where she drives research and development for customisable digital health devices, cultivating partnerships across academic institutions, healthcare providers, and industry leaders.
She earned her PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems through a joint program at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, where she studied socially assistive robotics and sensory feedback for cognitive decline. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in Neuroscience & Behavior and Computer Science from Mount Holyoke College.
Emilyann has led and contributed to international research initiatives, including co-investigating brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and robotic upper-limb rehabilitation at the Austrian Institute for Technology and co-designing non-invasive sensing systems for in-home UTI detection. She is passionate about driving co-created digital health solutions that translate emerging research into real-world patient impact.
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Associate Professor of History, University of Cincinnati
The comparative focus of my research is the social and cultural history of Britain and its Empire, across c18th-c20th, encompassing France, Italy, and the United States. I am the author of The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (St. Martin’s, 1998) and with Deborah Cohen, contributor and co-editor of Comparison and History (Routledge, 2004). After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, I taught history and literature in secondary schools in the Bronx and Surrey, England and worked for an investment firm in San Francisco, the year before starting graduate school at UC Berkeley.
My current research project reflects an ongoing curiosity about cultures of finance capitalism. Titled "Risking the World: The London Stock Exchange and the British Financial Empire, 1801-1910," it tells the story of the world of international finance, the culture of risk capital, and the gendered politics of speculating and investing in the British Empire from the Napoleonic Wars when the financial center shifted from Amsterdam to London to the aftermath of the South African War when London's financial supremacy was seriously challenged.
I have another book in the making, a collection of essays. "Desire in the Archive," is about grief, the body, intimacy and desire, characters in nineteenth century novels and the metaphorical arc of time's passage in coming to terms with loss.
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Art Director and Founder
Claudia Palmira is a New York–born, Rome-based artist, creative director, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of fine art, design, and cultural storytelling. Her practice spans digital and physical realms, from mixed-media works exploring beauty, consciousness, and language to defining visual identities for international exhibitions, institutions, and brands.
She is the founder of Clù, a collection of artist-designed silk scarves created from her original paintings and sold internationally, including at The Met Opera Shop in New York. Palmira is also the creator of The Aria Scarf and the originator of Calligraphic Abstractionism, a visual language in which written forms dissolve into expressive abstraction while retaining resonance and meaning. Her art work has been exhibited in Rome, New York and Greenwich, CT.
As Art Director of Laudato Sie, the 2025-2026 landmark exhibition of Franciscan manuscripts presented at Palazzo Braschi in Rome and the Sacred Convent of Assisi, she translated centuries of cultural heritage into a contemporary visual experience. Clients have included Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, the United Nations, and the Vatican.
Palmira serves as Chief Creative Officer of Beacon International Group and Measure Publishing. She is the author of the book The Micro Daily Practice, hosts private creative immersions in Rome, and proudly serves as Country Head for the Mount Holyoke Group of Italy.
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Author and Social Historian
Jane Robinson is an acclaimed social historian, focusing on women pioneers. Born in Edinburgh, she was brought up in North Yorkshire and read English at Somerville College, Oxford. For ten years she worked in the antiquarian book trade before becoming a full-time writer and public speaker. She has written 14 major books, including Hearts and Minds, looking at the hidden history of the fight for the vote; Bluestockings, the story of the first women to access higher education in Britain, and Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders, charting the lives and work of the first women to enter the elite professions.
Jane’s interests range from book-collecting (forced upon her at the age of 7 after being banned from her local library for using a jam tart bookmark) to designing and building pop-up Escape Rooms to raise funds for charity. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical and Royal Geographical Societies, a Hawthornden Fellow, a writing mentor, and a Senior Associate of Somerville College.
Dubbed by the BBC ‘one of our most original and engaging social historians,’ Jane is a popular guest at literary festivals, and on national radio and television.
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Publisher-at-Large and Charity Trustee
Having majored in International Relations at Mount Holyoke, Barbara Schwepcke pursued her dream of being a journalist in parallel with her life in academia, working for ZDF German Television, and after receiving her doctorate from the London School of Economics, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Focus. But journalism was changing: the space for longer, investigative pieces was shrinking, mainstream was challenged by social media, readers felt more comfortable in their echo chambers and unwilling to debate respectfully.
Don’t accept change if it’s not for the better: so Barbara worked as a publisher of Prospect Magazine, editor at the Harvill Press and in 2003 founded Haus Publishing. On the 10th anniversary of Haus, her good friend Peter Hennessy told her: ‘Never lose your holy curiosity,’ quoting Albert Einstein’s famous call to never stop questioning and to maintain a deep sense of wonder about the universe. The result: the Haus Curiosities series, short books, well-argued long think pieces, our contribution to an educated debate. Why stop there? What seems the most hopeless dialogue? Which divide seems too wide to bridge? To find answers to these questions Barbara brought together the GINGKO Interfaith Fellowship for their first retreat at Carberry Tower, just outside Edinburgh.