Scottish National Party - Scottish National Party (SNP) Leaders

PROFESSOR EWEN CAMERON is the Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at Edinburgh University. His four interrelated interests are the history of the Scottish Highlands, the land question, Scottish political history and the debates on Scotland within the Union from the late nineteenth century. His publications include Impaled Upon the Thistle: Scotland since 1880 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

EWEN ANGUS CAMERON graduated in 1984 from the University of Glasgow with a degree in Scottish history and politics. He is currently preparing a PhD thesis entitled Putting Scotland First: The Rise of the Scottish National Party 19661974 at the University of Strathclyde. He has followed Scottish nationalism with interest since his school years in East Perthshire.

ROBBIE DINWOODIE joined The Scotsman in his native Edinburgh in 1974, going on to cover the Falklands War, the miners strike and the conflict in Northern Ireland. Joining the Glasgow Herald in 1988, he became a political correspondent in 1994, reporting on the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 through to the independence referendum of 2014. He now contributes as a freelance writer and blogger.

PROFESSOR RICHARD FINLAY is head of the School of Humanities at Strathclyde University and author of a number of books on modern Scottish history. Among his work, he wrote Independent and Free (John Donald, 1994), the standard work on the origins and early years of the SNP, and Modern Scotland: 19142000 (Profile, 2003).

DOUGLAS FRASER is BBC Scotlands business and economy editor. Previously he was political editor of The Herald and prior to that the Sunday Herald, after working for The Scotsman from 1989 to 1997. He is co-author (with Gerry Hassan) of The Political Guide to Modern Scotland (Politicos Publishing, 2004).

PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER HARVIE was Professor of British Studies at the University of Tbingen in Baden-Wrttemberg, Germany, for over twenty years. He is the author of several of the standard reference books including Scotland and Nationalism: 17072004 (Routledge, 2004, 4th edition) and No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Modern Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 4th edition). He served as an SNP MSP from 2007 to 2011.

DR GERRY HASSAN is a writer and commentator. His PhD was on the Scottish political commentariat and its relationship with the public sphere. He is the author and editor of over twenty books on Scottish and British politics, social change, policy and ideas. These include The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (with Eric Shaw) (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Caledonian Dreaming: The Quest for a Different Scotland (Luath Press, 2014) and Independence of the Scottish Mind: Elite Narratives, Public Spaces and the Making of a Modern Nation (Macmillan, 2014).

ISOBEL LINDSAY was a lecturer in sociology at Strathclyde University. She was a national office-bearer of the SNP during the 1970s, convener of the cross-party Campaign for a Scottish Parliament and an executive member of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, and is currently a board member of Common Weal and Scottish Left Review. She has contributed widely to the debate on self-government, independence and the SNP, writing in The Radical Approach: Papers on an Independent Scotland (Palingenesis Press, 1976), Nationalism in the Nineties (Polygon, 1991) and The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

DR PETER LYNCH is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Stirling University and specialises in Scottish politics, nationalism, political parties and devolution. He maintains the Scottish Political Archive and is the author of the only single-volume history of the SNP, SNP: The History of the Scottish National Party (Welsh Academic Press, 2013, 2nd edition).

DR MARGERY PALMER MCCULLOCH is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at Glasgow University, an elected member of the Council of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and former Honorary Secretary of the Saltire Society. Her publications include works on significant figures in Scottish literary life, including Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, as well as Scottish Modernism and its Contexts, 19181959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

DR CATRIONA MACDONALD is Reader in Late Modern Scottish History at Glasgow University. Her research interests focus on Scottish sociopolitical and cultural history after 1832 and Scottish society and culture, especially Scottish literature. Her publications include Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotlands Twentieth Century (John Donald, 2009).

DR EILIDH MACPHAIL lectures at Lews Castle College in Stornoway in the University of the Highlands and Islands. She completed a PhD on the Europeanisation of Scottish government. Her specialist areas of research include devolution and regional government and politics.

PROFESSOR JAMES MITCHELL is Professor of Public Politics and director of the Academy of Government at Edinburgh University, having previously held similar posts at Sheffield and Strathclyde universities. His works include The Scottish National Party (with Rob Johns and Lynn Bennie), The Scottish Question (both Oxford University Press, 2011, 2014) and Takeover: Explaining the Extraordinary Rise of the SNP (Biteback, 2016) (with Rob Johns).

DR GORDON PENTLAND is Reader in History at Edinburgh University. His main interest is in British political history since the French Revolution, especially in radical politics. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 18002000. Among his publications is Radicalism, Reform and National Identity, 18201833 (Royal Historical Society Studies, 2008), which won the Hume Brown Senior Prize in 2010.

DR MALCOLM PETRIE is a Leverhulme Fellow in Edinburgh Universitys School of History, Classics and Archaeology. He specialises in twentieth-century Scottish and British history and is currently working on a project on Liberalism, Unionism and Nationalism in Scotland, 194583.

MANDY RHODES is managing director of Holyrood Communications and managing editor of Holyrood Magazine. She has worked for nearly thirty years in journalism in Scotland, in newsprint, television and radio broadcasting, was Scotland on Sundays social affairs correspondent, and has won numerous awards including PPA Magazine Editor of the Year, Feature Writer of the Year and Columnist of the Year.

MURRAY RITCHIE worked for forty-five years in journalism in Scotland, thirty-two of them on The Herald, and was the papers Scottish political editor from 1997 to 2003. He is author of Scotland Reclaimed: The Inside Story of Scotlands First Democratic Parliamentary Election (Saltire Society, 2000).

MIKE RUSSELL was SNP chief executive from 1994 to 1999 and has been a Member of the Scottish Parliament from 1999 to 2003 and from 2007 to the present. He served as a Minister in the SNP government, including serving in the Cabinet as Minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution during 2009 and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning from 200914. He has been Chair in Culture and Governance at Glasgow University since 2015 and is the author of numerous books, including