Moira Hansen
About Moira Hansen
Dr. Moira Hansen is a postdoctoral tutor and researcher in the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies. Leaving a career as a secondary school English teacher to return to full-time postgraduate study, her research was supported by a University of Glasgow Lord Kelvin Adam Smith doctoral scholarship. This led to the award of her PhD in 2020 for her thesis ‘”Melancholy and low spirits are half my disease”: physical and mental health in the life and works of Robert Burns’. She has written articles and book chapters which draw on various aspects her work, including ‘Mood disorder in the personal correspondence of Robert Burns: testing a novel interdisciplinary approach’ for the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (2018), ‘Robert Burns in the Jean Redpath Archive’ in Performing Robert Burns (EUP, 2021), and ‘Burns and women’ in the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (OUP, forthcoming 2023). She has also presented nationally and internationally at academic conferences and public events. She continues to work with the Centre for Robert Burns Studies across a range of projects while also exploring her own research interests in the intersections between literary and medical cultures in the late-eighteenth century, creativity and mental health, and the life of Burns’s close confidante Frances Dunlop. She is Reviews Editor for the Burns Chronicle (the first woman to hold a formal editorial role in the 130-year history of the journal), incoming Executive Secretary of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society and co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Scottish Literature (in preparation). She is also an Associate Lecturer in English Literature with The Open University.