G P Johnston Prize Winner 2020
Mila Daskalova
Mila Daskalova is a third year PhD student at the University of Strathclyde. Her AHRC funded doctoral project traces the origins, production and dissemination of periodicals published in nineteenth-century asylums and highlights the use of letterpress printing as therapy in Scotland and abroad. She has a forthcoming article on nineteenth-century printers’ relationship to work and mental health.
G P Johnston Prize Winner 2011
Vivienne Dunstan
Vivienne completed her PhD in 2010 at Dundee University, researching “Reading habits in Scotland circa 1750-1820”, examining a mix of diaries, memoirs, library borrowing records and evidence for book ownership. Before that she completed a taught Masters in Cultural and Urban Histories 1650-1850, also at Dundee, and a BA(Hons) in History and Classical Studies with the Open University. Originally she was a science student, with her first degree in Computer Science studied at St Andrews University. But a long-term love of history eventually took over, dating from a very young age, when she started to research her family history, visiting archives as a schoolgirl, in both the Scottish Borders where she grew up and in Edinburgh. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in History at Dundee University, and is converting her PhD thesis into more journal papers. Previous journal publications include articles in the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies and Scottish Archives.
G P Johnston Prize Winner 2008
Ruth M. McAdams
Ruth has recently completed her M.Phil. thesis at the University of Edinburgh under the direction of Bill Bell and Peter Garside, entitled “The Posthumous British Editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, 1832-1871, and the Evolution of his Literary Legacy”, for which she received generous funding from the Thouron foundation.
Before coming to Edinburgh, she graduated summa cum laude in 2006 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied English with minors in German and music theory, was moderator of the Philomathean Society, and played the oboe in the university orchestras. Originally from Chicago, USA, Ruth plans to pursue a PhD in English literature.