Rate My Professor Ashleigh Angus

Dr. Ashleigh Angus is a Research Assistant in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, within the Faculty of Humanities. She completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing at Curtin University, where she delved into Scottish literature and history, learning to address a single research question through both a miniature thesis and a creative project. This groundwork propelled her into the Aberdeen-Curtin Alliance PhD Scholarships program, with home registration at Curtin University and joint supervision from staff at the University of Aberdeen's School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture. Arriving in Aberdeen in February 2018 for a year abroad, her doctoral research centered on the relationship between women, witches, and fairy belief in 17th-century Orkney, Scotland. Through a work of historical fiction, she explored six witch trials in Orkney where women confessed to consorting with fairies, seeking to uncover their voices and how they drew upon fairy folklore to articulate their events, hopes, and fears. Her creative writing piece "Unknown, Unknown, death c 1629," inspired by the Scottish Survey of Witchcraft database and focusing on unidentified witches from Orkney, won the University of Aberdeen’s Literary Lights creative writing competition.