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.

As one of the first students to graduate through the Aberdeen-Curtin Alliance in 2021, Dr. Angus received her PhD in Perth in September that year. She has since contributed significantly to creative practice research at Curtin, co-developing the Creative Imaginations Symposium Discussion Paper in November 2021 as part of the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network (CCIRN) within her school. The paper addresses key issues in creative practice research, including definitions, methodologies, exegesis models for creative production theses, and Curtin University's guidelines for such work. Her expertise in blending historical research with creative prose underscores her commitment to innovative academic approaches in the humanities.