Session 1 (1:30pm - 3:00pm):

Chair:

Professor Louise Mallinder (QUB)

Speakers:

Professor David Armitage (Harvard): 'Gulliver's Travails: Treaty-Making and Treaty-Breaking in Modern History'

Professor Christopher McCrudden (QUB): 'The Role of Trust in International Treaty Negotiations'

Discussant:

Professor Richard Bourke (Cambridge)

Session 2 (3:30pm - 4:30pm):

Professor Dame Linda Colley (Princeton) in conversation with Professor Richard English (QUB) about her book, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen (Profile, 2021).

Biographies

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast. His books include: The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), and Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017).  He is currently writing a study of opera and international law from the Medici to the Met.  He is a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, an International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea.  In 2006 the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal for 'conspicuously important work ... of a nature that involves communicating with the public'.  In 2015 he received Cambridge University's highest degree, the LittD, for 'distinction by some original contribution to the advancement of science or of learning'.  Professor Armitage is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College Cambridge.  A prize-winning teacher and author, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Australia, Britain, China, France, Germany, South Korea, and the United States.  His works have been translated into sixteen languages.

Richard Bourke took his first degree at University College Dublin and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge.  He gained a second BA in Classics at Birkbeck College, University of London.  He held his first academic post in Dublin, before moving to Queen Mary University of London, where he became Professor in the School of History in 2012.  He was elected to the Chair in the History of Political Thought at Cambridge in 2018.  In 2022 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Arts by University College Dublin.  He previously co-directed the AHRC-funded project on Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective as well as the History in the Humanities and Social Sciences Network, also funded by the AHRC.  His work has attracted various accolades and awards, including as joint winner of the István Hont Memorial Book Prize in Intellectual History in 2016.  His research has been funded by the Humboldt Stiftung and the DAAD and he has held a number of Fellowships in Europe and the United States, including at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Free University in Berlin, and the University of Munich, as well as at the Huntington, Beinecke, William Andrews Clark, and John Carter Brown Libraries.  He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018.

Professor Dame Linda Colley studied history at Bristol University, before completing a PhD at Cambridge, where she became the first female Fellow of Christ’s College.  Her career has since taken her to Yale, the London School of Economics, and – since 2003 - to Princeton University, where she is the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History.  She is the author of: In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982); Namier (1988); Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize; Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002); The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007); Acts of Union and Disunion (2014), and The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021).  She has received eight honorary degrees, including one from Queen’s University Belfast.  Professor Colley writes on history, politics and art for the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books.  She has served on the Board of the British Library, the Council of Tate Britain, the Advisory Board of the Yale Center of British Art, and the Research Committee of the British Museum.  A Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was made a DBE for services to history in the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Honours List in 2021.

Richard English is Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen's University Belfast, where he is also Professor of Politics.  Between 2011 and 2016 he was Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations, and Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St Andrews.  His books include the award-winning studies Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (2003) and Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (2006).  His most recent books are Does Counter-Terrorism Work? (2024), Does Terrorism Work? A History (2016), The Cambridge History of Terrorism (edited, 2021), and The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (co-edited, 2019).  He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Fellow of Keble College Oxford, a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Chicago, a Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University, and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.  In 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to the understanding of modern-day terrorism and political history.  In 2019 he was awarded the Royal Irish Academy's Gold Medal in the Social Sciences.

Louise Mallinder is a Professor of Law and Deputy Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast.  At the University of Chicago she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and was the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights.  She holds a PhD in law, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen’s University Belfast.  Her book Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize.  She is co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace, and co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022). She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy.  She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group, and of the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges. She was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organization based in Belfast, during 2015-2020, and was Vice-Chair during 2013-2015 and 2020-2024.

Christopher McCrudden is honorary professor of human rights and equality law at the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, L. Bates Lea Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and a Fellow of the QUB Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice.  He holds an LLB from QUB, an LLM from Yale Law School, and a DPhil and DCL from Oxford University.  He is called to the Bars of England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland, and is a member of Blackstone Chambers in London.  QUB awarded him an honorary LLD in 2006.  He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2018, and an Honorary Bencher of the Bar of Northern Ireland in 2022.  He is the academic member of the Judicial Studies Board for Northern Ireland, and is also a member of the Board of the Irish Centre for European Law, and chair of its Northern Ireland Committee.  His books include Litigating Religions: An Essay on Human Rights, Courts and Beliefs (2018), Buying Social Justice (2007), and the co-authored Courts and Consociations (2013).  His most recent publication is an edited collection, The Law and Practice of the Ireland-Northern Ireland Protocol (2022). He was awarded a CBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours List.