John Kirk is Senior Lecturer in English and Scottish Language at Queen's University Belfast. During 2008-9, with Michael Brown and Andrew Noble, he held an AHRC Research Networks and Workshops Grant for the project which lies behind the present volume: United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 1770-1820. With primary research interests in dialectology and corpus linguistics, his most recent books are (with J. L. Kallen) SPICE-Ireland: A User's Guide (Belfast: ClO Ollscoil na Banriona, 2012) and (co-edited with I. MacLeod) Scots: The Language and its Literature: A Festschrift for J. Derrick McClure (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012).,
Michael Brown is Senior Lecturer in Irish and Scottish History at the University of Aberdeen and Acting Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. As well as being a co-director of the AHRC network grant United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 1770-1820 in 2008-9, he has directed an AHRC project on Irish and Scottish Diasporas since 1600 (2006-11). His primary research focus is on comparative Enlightenment, and he is the author of Francis Hutcheson in Dublin (Dublin; Four Courts Press, 2002) and A Political Biography of John Toland (London, Pickering & Chatto, 2011). He is currently finishing a study entitled The Irish Enlightenment.
Andrew Noble is a graduate of Aberdeen and Sussex Universities. He was also a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His teaching career was entirely at Strathclyde University, where he was for a time Head of the English Literature Section. He specialized in teaching American Literature and Romanticism. Before his retirement, he was the Convenor of the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative. His published research is mainly in Scottish literature and film. His extensive writings on Burns culminated in the publication of the joint-edition with P. S. Hogg of The Canongate Burns (2001, 2003). He has recently been appo