Poppy is a heritage researcher focused on LGBTQ+ activism, heritage, and community building, and a campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights.

Growing up in the Scottish Highlands and experiencing a real lack of LGBTQ+ representation, Poppy’s work has centered creating this representation through the documentation of Queer History.

Poppy has been working on creating representation of LGBTQ+ lives in the Scottish Highlands, having grown up there and experienced the need for representation. She holds an MSc in Cultural Heritage Futures, where she worked with a group of Highland queer elders to create a short documentary film (in collaboration with Olivia Barnette-Brown) exploring their experiences of finding and creating LGBTQ+ community in the Highlands. Crucially this projected centered the queer elders own voices in the narration of their experiences while also creating tangible archival documentation of a snapshot in queer time. 

She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, where she is investing queer Highland history on a greater scale with the objective of showcasing the fabulous LGBTQ+ community in the north. 

In 2024, Poppy co-founded a queer football team (Slay FC), the world’s first explicitly LGBTQ+ student football team. Since then, the team has been recognised at the Football vs Homophobia awards this year. They also served as the University of Edinburgh Pride Society president, where she organised an array of events, including an exhibition, ‘Reframing Gender’, for queer and trans students and a queer inclusion in sports panel.