Dr Juliette Desportes

Biography

Postdoctoral Research Assistant

• juliette.desportes@uhi.ac.uk

My research focuses on the ways Highland land has been managed, transformed, and contested across the long eighteenth-century. I am particularly interested in rural histories and geographies of protest and resistance and the politics of the ‘land question’ in Scotland in the early modern and modern periods.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Resistance to Improvement in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820’ with Dr Iain Robertson (UHI) and Professor Carl Griffin (University of Sussex). The project investigates how rural workers in the Highlands sought to defend their livelihoods and ways of life in the age of radical ‘improvements’ which transformed the social and economic basis of Scottish agriculture. 

I completed my PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2024. My thesis explored the processes of land ‘improvement’ and the ways the Highland region was used as a site of experiment for socio-economic, cultural, social, and intellectual improvement by the British state and its agents. I took as a case study the Highland estates forcefully annexed by the Crown after the Jacobite rising of 1745 and managed by the Scottish legal and landowning elite until 1784. I am currently writing my first monograph which will be based on my thesis and published with Edinburgh University Press as part of their 'Scotland’s Land' series edited by Professor Annie Tindley. 

I am particularly interested in how history and historians can serve a wider public and I am always keen to collaborate with communities and heritage organisations. In the past, I have worked as a historical consultant in the private sector and have a longstanding collaboration with the Urras Oighreachd Ghabhsainn in the Isle of Lewis as part of the Na Dorsan project.