MEET THE EXPERTS

Caroline is Professor of Craniofacial Identification and Director of the Forensic Research Institute (FORRI) at Liverpool John Moores University.  She is a chartered forensic anthropologist Level I (craniofacial specialism) by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and is an experienced forensic practitioner.

Caroline is currently Chair of the EU-funded COST Action for Migrant Disaster Victim Identification, a consortium created to enhance the identification of people who die trying to reach Europe from war torn or socioeconomically disrupted countries. These MDVI efforts received a Times Higher Education Award 2023 for Research Project of the Year; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Caroline is also Director of Face Lab, a research group within FORRI that carries out forensic/archaeological research and consultancy work including craniofacial analysis, facial depiction and forensic art. Craniofacial analysis involves the depiction and identification of unknown bodies for forensic investigation or historical figures for archaeological interpretation. Face Lab research relates to facial identification, craniofacial reconstruction, preserved bodies and facial animation. Face Lab has depicted the faces of King Richard III, Robert the Bruce, Ramesses II and Cleopatra.

Caroline is Fellow of the RAI, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), the Anatomical Society and the Royal Photographic Society. She received the 2016 Combined Royal Colleges Medal for excellence in clinical imaging and has appeared in multiple television series, including Meet the Ancestors (BBC), History Cold Case (BBC), Expert Witness (C4), Real crime (C5), Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2022 (BBC) and Secrets of the Dead (PBS). 

David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster in language and linguistics. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, he spent his early childhood in Holyhead, attended secondary school in Liverpool, and read English at University College London. After a research year at UCL's Survey of English Usage, he lectured at Bangor and then Reading, where he became professor of linguistic science. He left the full-time university world in 1984 to work as an independent scholar. An autobiographical memoir, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through, appeared in 2009.

His writing takes in most areas of language study, his best-known authored books being The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (3rd edition 2010) and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (3rd edition 2019). There's a complete bibliography on his website, www.davidcrystal.com.

His interest in reconstructing earlier periods of English pronunciation, to enable works to be presented or performed in contemporary accents, began in 2004, when he was invited to work with the company at Shakespeare's Globe in London on a production of Romeo and Juliet in original pronunciation (now generally referred to as 'OP'). This was written up in Pronouncing Shakespeare (2005, updated edition 2019) and the general approach in The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016).

He has since worked with several theatre companies and early music ensembles on OP performances of works from Shakespeare's time, and in 2013 the approach was used for an earlier period in a British Library CD: Tyndale's Bible: Saint Matthew's Gospel in Original Promnunciation. The Old English period is covered in the dedicated OP website www.originalpronunciation.com, and the third edition of the English Language encyclopedia has an associated website at Cambridge University Press which includes audio extracts from the Middle English period.

Other books that relate to 'A Voice for Richard' are The Stories of English (2004), which includes the period in which Richard lived, and Sounds Appealing: the Passionate Story of English Pronunciation (2018), which introduces the subjects that provide the frame of reference for work in OP: phonetics and phonology.

Philippa Langley is an historian and award-winning producer, best known for her discovery of Richard III in 2012. She is co-author of the bestselling The Lost King with Michael Jones (first published as The King's Grave, John Murray 2013), and Finding Richard III, the official account of her Looking For Richard Project. On the ten-year anniversary of discovering Richard III, her extraordinary story was released as the internationally acclaimed major feature film, The Lost King, directed by Sir Stephen Frears and starring Sally Hawkins.

In November 2023, Philippa once again rewrote the history books in her new work: The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, UK; Pegasus, USA). Based on her remarkable new research initiative The Missing Princes Project its now seven-year investigation revealed the Princes survived to challenge Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, for the throne of England. The project was made into a feature-length Factual Special TV documentary by Channel 4, PBS in America and SBS in Australia. 

Wendy Johnson
Wendy Johnson is a full-time writer, and has been a member of the Richard III Society for almost forty years. Along with her husband, David, she is a founder member of Philippa Langley’s Looking For Richard Project, which successfully located the king’s lost grave in 2012, and in 2014 she co-authored Finding Richard III: The Official Account of Research by the Retrieval and Reburial Project.  

Wendy’s debut novel The Traitor’s Son, the first in a Ricardian trilogy, was published by Made Global Publishing in April 2024, and is available in both paperback and e-book. She is currently working on the sequel.

“A stunning debut novel that draws the reader into a skilfully woven and utterly believable fifteenth century.”  Matthew Lewis, historian and writer.