Partnerships and People
Dominique Bouchard
Dominique Bouchard is Head of Learning and Interpretation at English Heritage, and has more than fifteen years’ experience leading exhibitions, engagement and learning in museums in Hong Kong, Ireland and the UK. She has particular expertise working with marginalised communities and contested heritages. Her DPhil in classical archaeology from the University of Oxford explored the relationship between public art, identity and power in medieval and early Renaissance south Italy. Dominique is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester and is a 2021 Clore Duffield Fellow.
Michael Carter
Michael Carter is Senior Properties Historian at English Heritage. A historian and art historian, he is a specialist on medieval monasticism, especially in the late Middle Ages, c.1300–1540. Before joining English Heritage in 2015, he was Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. His scholarly publications include his monograph The Art and Architecture of the Cistercians in Northern England, c. 1300–1540 (Brepols, 2019). Dedicated to making England’s monastic past accessible, relevant and stimulating, he was worked on major interpretation projects at several English Heritage sites, including Battle, Hailes, Rievaulx and Whitby.
Photo by Rachel Saunders
Rosie Garland
Rosie Garland is a writer and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. Her award-winning work has been published internationally. Her writing commissions include work for the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the Tate Modern. Her latest poetry collection is entitled What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Polari Prize in 2021. Her novels are studied at universities across the UK, Europe and Canada, and The Night Brother (2017) was described by The Times as ‘a delight . . . with shades of Angela Carter’. In 2018–19, Rosie was the inaugural Writer in Residence at the splendidly Gothic John Rylands Library in Manchester, and Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. She has a passion for language nurtured by public libraries. For further details see. www.rosiegarland.com
Robert Lloyd Parry
Robert Lloyd Parry is an actor and writer who specialises in literary storytelling: theatrical performances based upon texts from the golden age of the short story in English, c. 1880–1930. Since 2005 he has been touring the UK with the The M. R. James Project, a series of solo performances that bring to life the masterpieces of the father of the English Ghost Story. In 2015 he appeared as M. R. James in Mark Gatiss’s BBC documentary M R James: Ghost Writer. He has himself produced, written and presented two documentaries based on James’s work – Wits in Felixstowe and Dim Presences – and is currently working on a third about James’s travels in Scandinavia. He recently edited Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (Swan River Press, 2021), an anthology of ghost stories by M. R. James and his Cambridge contemporaries. Between 2013 and 2016 he toured his adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine around the UK, with the support of Arts Council England. He regularly performs short stories online and in pubs and libraries throughout the UK, including works by the likes of H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Saki, Arthur Machen, Kenneth Graham, Algernon Blackwood and E. F. Benson. For further details see www.nunkie.co.uk & www.youtube.com/c/NunkieFilms.
Robert Lloyd Parry as M. R. James.
Photo by Shelagh Bidwell.
Dale Townshend
Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely in the field of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic writing, including, most recently, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (OUP, 2019) and the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Gothic (co-edited with Angela Wright and Catherine Spooner, CUP, 2020–21). He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Writing Britain’s Ruins, 1700–1850: The Architectural Imagination, an interdisciplinary research project out of which arose the collection Writing Britain’s Ruins (co-edited with Michael Carter and Peter N. Lindfield, British Library Publishing, 2017). He is currently completing a monograph on Matthew Gregory Lewis, and co-editing the posthumous works of Ann Radcliffe for the Cambridge Edition of the writer’s complete works.