Julian is acting Deputy Faculty Pro-Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Arts Design and Social Sciences at Northumbria University. He is a historian of modern Europe and the author of two books with Oxford University Press, on regionalism and socialism. Julian is particularly fascinated by the idea and experience of time in the present. Working with colleagues from other disciplines, he recently brought out a ground-breaking volume with the Proceedings of the British Academy, 'Time on a Human Scale' which puts the human present back into the cultural, philosophical and literary history of Europe between 1860 and 1930.

Julian's new project on the experience of ordinary people who were living 'outside of time' in the era of the Second World War demands a focus on the practices of the everyday, from writing to performing to familial relationships, and how people tried to reconstruct these ordinary temporal rhythms in difficult conditions, from those living under siege to prisoners in camps or people living in secrecy in occupied Europe.

Before appointment to Northumbria University in 2017, Julian was an Education Director and taught in the History Department at Durham University for thirteen years. Earlier in his career he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church Oxford and prior to that a Senior Scholar of the Modern History Faculty in Oxford, where he was educated as an undergraduate and DPhil student. He has held a visiting professorship at the École des hautes Études en Sciences sociales, Paris.

Tony Gray completed his DPhil at Wolfson College Oxford in Philosophical Theology before entering the publishing industry.

Through his company Words by Design, Tony has worked on over a hundred private biographies (clients have included a polar explorer, a chimney sweep, peers of the realm, WWII POWs, CEOs of multi-nationals, hoteliers, teachers, missionaries, pilots and builders); researched and written a number of significant family histories (including histories of the Schwarzschild, Hajduska, Howarth and Quarmby families); and acted as a consultant for other publishing companies (helping set up and establish private presses and small independent publishers).

His research interests include theology of religions (his best-selling book was a cartoon guide to the basics of theology), family history (especially his own, where he has so far completed two out of a seven-volume series), human rights (having worked on edited collections such as Maternal Mortality and Human Rights and Contemporary Human Rights Challenges), and the histories of buildings (in particular the histories of small churches and their congregations, having so far worked on the histories of Chipping Norton Baptist Church, Stow-on-the-Wold Methodist Church, and Lydney Baptist Church).

Anna Beer, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University, is an established life-writer with a series of major books to her name. She has many years of experience working with writers at various stages of their careers to take their work to the next level, most recently directing and teaching for the University of Oxford’s Creative Writing MSt, where she was the specialist non-fiction tutor.

Anna has published biographies of major literary figures, John Milton and William Shakespeare among them, but her particular interest as a writer remains the relationship between creativity and gender. Her Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, shortlisted for the RPS Creative Communication award in 2017, continues to generate other work, whether on stage, radio or television. Another biography has led to Anna being hired as a script consultant by a TV production company for a new historical drama series – although it is very much ‘in development’ at this stage!

Anna Beer’s latest book, to be published in the UK and US in October 2022, is Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature, and is her most ambitious, wide-ranging and (perhaps) controversial book to date. She is currently exploring some new literary avenues and is delighted at the thought of working with other writers on their own creative journey.

Biographer, academic, musician and BBC broadcaster Kate Kennedy is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, a presenter for BBC Radio 3, and Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She lectures in music and English at Oxford University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her biography Dweller in Shadows: Ivor Gurney, poet, composer was published by Princeton University Press in June 2021, and was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. Her edited collection with Dame Hermione Lee entitled Lives of Houses was published by Princeton in March 2020. She is currently writing a biographical memoir focussed around the cello, exploring our relationship with the instrument and its capacity to tell stories about the lives of its players. Cello will be published by Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury in 2023.

Her triple biography and operatic play The Fateful Voyage (2017) dramatizes the stories of Rupert Brooke and composers FS Kelly and William Denis Browne, and blends dance, opera and theatre (starring Alex Jennings). It was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research by Oxford University in 2017.

She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to the BBC, and advised the commemorations for the First World War and for International Women’s Day for Radio 3, among other regular projects.

She is also in demand as a public lecturer and interviewer, appearing regularly at the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre and Southbank Centre with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Berkeley Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia.

www.drkatekennedy.com

Alice is a music historian and author of fiction. Her academic work focuses on music collecting from 1700 to the present day, specialising in folk music. She is a Research Fellow in the Music Faculty at Oxford University, based at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, where she recently published a biographical catalogue of the Anthony Baines Archive. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and 2019-21 was a Humanities Knowledge Exchange Fellow, working with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She is Administrator at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and runs OWM’s feedback group on Tuesday afternoons.

Alice has had five anthologies of short fiction published, as well as individual short stories published elsewhere. She is currently Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods. She runs Didcot Writers, and co-ordinates the Oxfordshire group for the Society of Authors.

As a mentor, Alice is particularly interested in projects relating to any of her specialisms (music, British history, museums and objects), as well as works that bridge the gap between history and fiction, and in structural questions such as where to begin a story and how to provide background information within a forward-moving narrative.

https://alicelittle.co.uk/