CLAN Gathering 2026- History Panel

Annie Tindley

Annie Tindley is Professor of British and Irish Rural History and since 2020 the Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University. Her research interests include land issues, rural and environmental history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Scottish, Irish, British and imperial contexts. She has published widely on questions of landownership (private, state and community), land reform and land use and management.

Andy Wightman

Andy Wightman is a writer, researcher, analyst, commentator and activist on issues of land, power and governance. Andy is the author of Who Owns Scotland (1996) and The Poor Had No Lawyers (2010) and has undertaken a wide range of work on land tenure, landownership, land reform and, more recently community land rights, governance and the hegemonic dimensions of land relations.

Ryan Dziadowiec

Dr Ryan Dziadowiec is a researcher and heritage practitioner based in Inverness. His research centres around the confluence of people, place and language, particularly in the context of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. In 2024 he completed his PhD thesis investigating the Gaelic concept dùthchas, after which he worked as an archivist with Community Land Scotland on the 100 Years of Community Ownership project.

Chris Whatley

Chris Whatley is one of Scotland’s most distinguished historians, an emeritus professor of Scottish history at the University of Dundee, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh who was awarded an OBE for his work in disseminating Scottish history in the schools and internationally, in 2015. He has written and edited almost 30 books and published around 150 papers on aspects of Scotland’s history. His most recent book is Harvie’s Dyke: The People, Their Liberty and the Clyde (2025). This has emerged from his work on popular protest, something which he has been investigating for almost 40 years.

Juliette Desportes (Chair)

Juliette Desportes is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Centre for History, UHI. Her research focuses on matters of Highland land management, ownership, and governance in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the history of rural resistance. She previously collaborated with the Galson Estate Trust on the Na Dorsan project.