Edward Hollis: Edward studied Architecture at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities; and practiced as an architect for six years, first in Sri Lanka, in the practice of Geoffrey Bawa, in Sri Lanka famous for his garden of follies and ruins at Lunuganga; and then in the practice of Richard Murphy, well known for his radical alterations to ancient and historic buildings in and around Edinburgh.

In 1999, Edward Hollis began lecturing in Interior Architecture at Napier University, Edinburgh, In 2004, he moved to Edinburgh College of Art, where until 2012, he ran undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Interior Design. He is now director of Postgraduate research at ECA.

Hollis is currently developing a doctoral environment for interdisciplinary studies in Cultural Heritage. This includes a newly launched PhD programme in Cultural Heritage that stretches across the University of Edinburgh and beyond to the ‘Una Her Doc’ – a collaborative environment for doctoral training, research and development that is shared with the universities of the Una Europa consortium, across Europe.

Working with follies and ruins in Sri Lanka, with modern interventions to historic buildings in Scotland, has focussed Hollis’ research on building stories and narrative structures that connect people, time, folk tale, and the every-changing built environment.

His first book, The Secret Lives of Buildings: a collection of folk tales stories about mythical buildings was published in 2009; and his second The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors was published in 2013. His third book, How to Make a Home was published for the School of Life in 2016.​ His fourth A Drama in Time is a guide to Riddles Court, the oldest house in Edinburgh. This book brings together a history of an ancient building with an account of the activism that ‘saved’ the building for educational and public uses in 2018.

Indeed, much of Hollis’ work engages with heritage activism. Between 2012-18 he was involved with the Invisible College, an interdisciplinary group developing experimental plans to re-occupy the ruins of Gillespie Kidd and Coia’s modernist seminary at Cardross in Argyll through ephemeral artistic intervention.

Since 2018 he has been working with the inhabitants of Asansol, a coal-mining town in West Bengal, India, to find innovative ways to celebrate their industrial heritage through storytelling and study. In this capacity he has helped the Asansol Heritage Research Group create Setubandha the first heritage museum and archive in the district, at Kazi Nazrul University in the town.

Since 2021 he has been working with the community activists at the Granton:Hub and Una Europa partners on international research projects relating to cultural heritage on the urban peripheries of Paris, Madrid, and Edinburgh.

Isidora Stankovic: Isidora, PhD, is a post-doctoral manager for the focus area “Cultural Heritage” within UNA Europa European University Alliance, at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Ruxandra-Iulia Stoica: Ruxandra is a registered architect and urbanist specialising in the historic environment. She teaches and undertakes professional training and consultancy work in the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies. After graduating from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, she studied Medieval Studies at Central European University, before pursuing PhD research on “Ideology of Urban Conservation” at the University of Edinburgh.

Marianna Vivitsou: Marianna is postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She is interested in multimodal modes of expression, heritage-related storytelling and visual ethnographic research methods.