Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail.
The Featured Researcher for July 2025 is Ashley Brown (she/her). Brown is working towards a Doctoral Award funded by SGSAH and AHRC DTP in Gender History. The title of her thesis is:
Fraternity, feuds, and the academic bubble: masculinities present at Scottish universities between 1560 and 1610.
HEIs: University of Glasgow, School of Humanities
Supervisors: Professor Alex Shepard; Steven Reid; Dr Sam Rutherford.
Below, Brown gives a brief synopsis of her doctorate. She then answers some questions about her research, her experience of working on her PhD, and the lessons she’s learned as a doctoral candidate.
Fraternity, feuds, and the academic bubble: masculinities present at Scottish universities between 1560 and 1610.
What happens when you have an overambitious theatre maker doing a PhD in Scottish gender history? This question has shaped my PhD project since the beginning – I was super keen to combine my historical research with my theatrical background, as I firmly believe that there is a huge amount of scope for Humanities academics to bring in creative practice into their work. I wanted to demonstrate this and, luckily for me, SGSAH were more than willing to accommodate!
My play ‘In His Own Image’ had a successful preview performance on the 4th June at Civic House in Glasgow. This was kindly supported by the Thinking Culture programme, the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow and, of course, SGSAH, who have backed my project from the beginning. We’ll be heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from the 11th-16th August at the Space at Surgeon’s Hall and we’d love to see you there!
The play is a dark comedy, set in the present day, exploring the behaviours and attitudes of five different men. They are part of a historical reenactment troupe (had to get the history in somewhere!) and they are beset by different problems on the day that we see them. Negotiating the stress of someone calling in sick and being booked for the wrong kind of gig, the men each react differently to the various tensions they experience, revealing issues that they’ve been trying to cover up. Bringing together the methodological approaches which underpin my research with the actors’ own experiences as male-presenting people, the show aims to be authentic in its depiction of the characters we see – I wanted the audience to sit there thinking ‘I know someone who acts a bit like that’ or ‘that character reminds me of this person’. I know that I can see different men from my own life reflected in the wonderfully complex characters we brought to life.
The show is devised, meaning that we – myself and my assistant director Esme Paul – worked with the actors to improvise the play and then work through what we had created, keeping the bits we liked and getting rid of those we didn’t. This is a really fresh and collaborative way of working and means that every performance of the show is a little bit different, as it’s led by the actors and shaped by how they want to react to things onstage each time. This also adds to the authenticity, as the male-presenting agents are the ones who have shaped the story – I see my role as having provided some kind of skeleton for it and then guiding everyone to work as a team.
I’ve loved every second of this project and am really grateful to SGSAH for the opportunity to develop my connection with my research through the play. Although it’s not developed my research in a direct way, my approach to the historical figures in my PhD has definitely changed and I also now have some fun post-doc project ideas, which is very handy!
What sparked your interest in this subject?
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?
That people haven’t really changed that much whilst so much has changed! That sounds a bit redundant, but I think people haven’t really evolved much – it’s the social structures, technologies and the ways that we couch things that have changed massively. I’ve also learned that there’s always a new angle of looking at things which can be really fruitful and productive in historical research.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?
That I can really connect with my historical subjects in an emotional way. I’m currently working on a bunch of letters which different intellectuals sent each other in my period and some parts are really moving and others are really funny. I have to then tread a careful line to make sure that my emotions don’t take over my analysis but I’m enjoying the odd intimacy that I’m feeling with the people I’m looking at.
If you were your own supervisor what advice would you give yourself?
Which researcher would you particularly like to spotlight?
[Interview and Feature by Isabella Shields]
