Iain Robertson
Project Investigator
Iain Robertson is Associate Professor of Historical Geography at the Centre for History, UHI. His principal research expertise and interest is in the investigation and interpretation of acts of rural social protest whenever and wherever they are found. Iain’s work has, however, focused primarily on the period of intense land disturbances in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland after 1914 – the later Land Wars. Beyond simply documenting their chronology and geography, Iain has interrogated many other facets of these events including the informal land occupation, the presence and prominence of women and the radicalising impact of war service. In this, his over-arching ambition has been to explore these disturbances in the context of thinking in the vibrant, broader field of protest studies.
His publication include The Later Highland Land Wars: protest, space and landscape after 1914, (London: Ashgate, 2013); Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance, with Carl Griffin and Roy Jones, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); ‘Spaces of assertion: informal land occupations in the Scottish Highlands after 1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, 53 (2016).
Carl Griffin
Co – Investigator
Carl Griffin is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor in the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. His award-winning interdisciplinary research examines the transformations and dislocations effected by agrarian capitalism – paying particular attention to the interplay between power, resistance, and environment – in a range of mainly eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century contexts. Speaking to debates in history, human geography and the wider humanities on activism and social change, poverty and hunger, the politics of enclosure, and the more-than-human, his research has refocused and recharged studies of popular protest and the politics of agrarian change in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.
His latest books include Remembering Protest in Britain Since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape (with Briony McDonagh, 2018), Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance (with Roy Jones and Iain Robertson, 2019), and The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, c.1750–c.1840 (2020). Beyond ‘Resistance…’, he is also writing up another Leverhulme Trust funded project, writing a new history of enclosure ‘from the bottom up’.
Juliette Desportes
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Juliette Desportes is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Centre for History, UHI. Her research focuses on the ways Highland land has been managed, transformed, and contested across the long eighteenth-century. Juliette is particularly interested in rural histories and geographies of protest and resistance and the politics of the ‘land question’ in Scotland in the early modern and modern periods. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2024. Her thesis explored the processes of land ‘improvement’ and the ways the Highland region was used as a site of experiment for socio-economic, cultural, social, and intellectual improvement by the British state and its agents, taking as a case study the Highland estates forcefully annexed by the Crown after the Jacobite rising of 1745. She is currently writing her first monograph based on her thesis which will be published with Edinburgh University Press as part of their ‘Scotland’s Land’ series edited by Professor Annie Tindley.
Juliette’s publications include ‘Poor Relief as ‘improvement’: Moral and Spatial Economies of Care in Scotland’, 33, Continuity and Change (2023) (with Eliska Bujokova) and ‘Most useful labor in time of peace’: Early Crofting Schemes in the Annexed Estates, 1763–1784′, 14.2, Northern Scotland (2023).