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Project Team

The team carrying out the project consists of Professor Richard Fawcett and Dr Julian Luxford in the School of Art History, who will be dealing mainly with the architectural evidence, and Professor Richard Oram of the Department of History at Stirling University, who will be dealing with the documentation.

Professor Richard Fawcett

Richard Fawcett has worked in the Inspectorate of Historic Scotland (and its predecessor bodies) since 1974. Having been appointed an honorary (and subsequently part-time) professor in the School of Art History in 2007, he now divides his time between those two bodies. His doctorate was awarded for research into late medieval architecture in Norfolk, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 2008 he was appointed OBE. His publications include: Scottish architecture from the accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation, 1371-1560 (1994), Scottish abbeys and priories (1994), Scottish cathedrals (1997), Scottish medieval churches, architecture and furnishings (2002), Melrose Abbey (2004), Dryburgh Abbey (2005), the latter two written jointly with Richard Oram.

Richard's Profile


Dr Julian Luxford

Julian Luxford took his undergraduate degree at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he won the D M Myers Medal for most outstanding student in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He subsequently gained a scholarship to read for his Ph.D. at King's College Cambridge, where he studied with Paul Binski. After graduating in 2002 he obtained a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare College Cambridge, whence he took up a lectureship in Art History at the University of St Andrews in January 2004. He has contributed articles on medieval history, art, architecture and manuscripts to many academic journals and books, and is author of The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1370-1540: A Patronage History (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press: 2005), which was shortlisted for and Highly Commended in the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award for 2007. He is also editor of Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, Brepols: 2008).

Julian's Profile


Professor Richard Oram

Richard Oram is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Stirling, where he teaches Environmental History and Scottish Medieval History, and where he is the Director of the Centre for Environmental History and Policy.  He is a member of the Scottish Government’s Historic Environment Advisory Council for Scotland.  His first degree was in Medieval History with Archaeology (1983) and his PhD in Medieval History (1988) focussed on the Lordship of Galloway c.1000 to c.1250, both completed at the University of St Andrews.  He has researched and published extensively on aspects of medieval and early modern land-use and resource exploitation, climate change and medieval socio-economic restructuring, urban-rural relations and fuel supply.  Publications include The Lordship of Galloway (2000), David I (2004), Melrose Abbey (2004) and Dryburgh Abbey (2005), the last two both written jointly with Richard Fawcett,  Lordship and Architecture in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (2005), which he edited with Geoffrey Stell, and the edited volume The Reign of Alexander II (2005). 

For more information see Richard's profile


Dr Tom Turpie

Tom Turpie took his undergraduate degree at the University of Stirling graduating in 2005. He subsequently gained a series of small scholarships which allowed him to complete first an MSc in Medieval History and then a PhD under the tutelage of Steve Boardman at the University of Edinburgh. Following the completion of his doctorate in 2011 Tom has worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant on Phase 2 of the Corpus Project, for the Family Names UK project and taught a range of medieval history courses at Stirling and Edinburgh. He has contributed several articles on the cult of the saints in medieval Scotland to academic journals and is currently working on a monograph entitled 'From Catastrophe to Reform. Ninian of Whithorn and the saints of Scotland in the later middle ages'.