Three Fellowships were open to all QUB academic staff who have already been awarded sabbatical leave by their School for a semester during 2025-26.  As part of the award, the academics each receive £4,000 from the Institute to support their research activities, they will present their research in a Mitchell Institute Lecture or Workshop and will be provided with office space at the Institute, during their tenure.

Professor Kathryn McNeilly

 Kathryn McNeilly is Professor of Law at the School of Law.

While a Sabbatical Fellow at the Institute, she will work on a monograph project entitled Institutional Time and International Human Rights Law Bodies (currently under contract with Oxford University Press). This project adds to emergent thinking on the connection between international human rights law and time, which Kathryn has led development of in recent years. The work breaks new ground by exploring time as a significant force that is institutionalised within United Nations human rights bodies, enhancing understanding of them and their contribution to the legal system they are located within.

Kathryn will join us in Semester 1.

Professor Declan French

Declan French is a Professor in Queens Business School. 

During his tenure he will progress an interdisciplinary project that provides data on the symbolic landscape – flags and murals – in Northern Ireland, collected using Google Streetview.  The aim is to provide a cultural interpretation of the nature of public expressions of cultural identity in Northern Ireland and to determine whether there are welfare costs to these displays in terms of house prices and mental health.  He will complete writing-up of work on the nature of NI public expressions of identity combining spatial analysis with anthropological interpretation and categorisation.  He will devise the methodology to identify causality for the second study on the effect of displays on house prices.   Also, he will work on data cleaning for the third study on cultural displays and mental health.  Data on rates of GP prescribing for anxiolytics and antidepressants will be sourced from the Enhanced Prescribing Database.  

 Declan will join us in Semester 2.

Dr Elena Caoduro

Elena Caoduro is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media in the School of Art, English and Languages.

 During her Sabbatical Fellowship, Dr Elena Caoduro will work on her monograph Retro Terror in German and Italian Cinema: Memory, Nostalgia and Left-Wing Terrorism, which examines how contemporary cinema engages with the legacy of 1970s political violence.  Through a comparative study of German and Italian films, the project explores how screen media reframe histories of extremism, trauma, and activism in light of present-day concerns.  By investigating memory, representation, and justice across drama, biopics, comedies, thriller and documentary films, the book contributes to wider debates on the cultural afterlives of violence, and the role of the arts in mediating complex political pasts.

Elena will join us in Semester 2.

Mitchell Institute Interim Director Professor Louise Mallinder commented:  'We're delighted to welcome Kathryn, Declan and Elena to the Mitchell Institute as Sabbatical Fellows.   We hope that the Fellowship scheme, and being based in the Institute’s interdisciplinary environment, will be a valuable experience for them as they develop their important research.’

We look forward to providing updates on their activity in the coming academic year.