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Academic Staff

Committee
Olwen Purdue
Professor Olwen Purdue
Director

Professor Olwen Purdue is a social historian of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland with a particular focus on social class, urban poverty and welfare. 

She also works on public history in divided societies. Her latest monograph, Workhouse Child: Poverty, Child Welfare and the Poor Law in industrial Belfast, 1880-1918, is due out with Liverpool University Press in 2023, and an edited collection (with Leonie Hannan) on Difficult Public Histories in Ireland is due out with Routledge in 2024. Olwen was formerly international editor for The Public Historian and is currently series editor for Liverpool University Press’ Nineteenth-Century Ireland series. She sits on the Council of the Royal Historical Society and the Board of Directors of the Irish Museums Association and is a member of the advisory board for the Ulster Museum.

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Leonie Hannan
Dr Leonie Hannan
Assistant Director

Dr Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on intellectual life in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on themes of gender, material culture and domestic space.

Her second monograph for Manchester University Press: A Culture of Curiosity: Scientific Enquiry in the Eighteenth-Century Home is forthcoming alongside an edited volume for Routledge (with Olwen Purdue) on Dealing with Difficult Pasts: the Public History of Ireland. Leonie has worked extensively in museums and heritage and built collaborative working relationships between researchers, teachers, curators, museum collections and heritage sites. She is currently on the Advisory Boards for the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies and the Northern Irish Museums Council. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and sits on the Executive Board of the international research group Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing. She is the Director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Co-Lead of the Science and Culture Research Group at Queen's University. Leonie is also part of the 100 Hours research group which experiments with methodologies for material culture research.

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Maurice Casey
Dr Maurice Casey

Dr Maurice Casey is a Research Fellow at QUB working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before liberation’. 

Previously, he curated two major exhibitions as the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs Historian in Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum from 2020 to 2022. Maurice has broad public history experience across print and broadcast media, including contributions to series commissioned by TG4, Audible and the BBC. He is particularly interested in the opportunities for historical storytelling provided by trade audience history books and video games.

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Niamh Cullen
Dr Niamh Cullen

Dr Niamh Cullen specialises in the social history of twentieth-century Western Europe, and especially of post-1945 Italy. 

Her research draws on the history of the emotions, gender and sexuality, popular culture and personal testimony. In 2015 she organised an exhibition, “Love, Italian Style’, drawing on popular depictions of romance in 1950s and 1960s Italian film and magazines, in the Italian Cultural Institute, Dublin. Niamh is currently developing a new project on the history of motherhood and infant feeding in twentieth-century Europe. She has written for the Dublin Review of Books and for History Today and her work has featured in The Local (Italy).

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Sean O'Connell
Professor Sean O'Connell

Professor Sean O'Connell works on Irish and British social history. He is a founder of QUOTE Hub (Queen’s University collective of oral historians) and editor of Oral History. 

He has published extensively on the history of history of working-class experiences of consumer credit and debt, including Mail Order Retailing in Britain: a Business and Social History (2005), Credit and Community: Working Class Debt since 1880 (2009 ) and The Politics of Consumer Credit in the UK, 1938-1992 (2018) and is currently working on the history of joyriding. Most recently, Sean completed a research report, commissioned by the Northern Ireland Department of Health examining the history of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland (published Jan 2021).

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Emma Reisz
Dr Emma Reisz

Dr Emma Reisz's current research focuses on empire and transnational links in Asia, mapping imperialism and interconnection across space, ideas and social networks. 

The Robert Hart Project http://sirroberthart.org examines the far-reaching influence of an Irishman, Robert Hart, as Inspector-General of Chinese Maritime Customs in the last half-century of the Qing empire. The AHRC-funded project Reframing the Visualities of Imperial War examines the use of early photography in the development of visual vocabularies through which British imperialism in Asia was understood.

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Nik Ribianszky
Dr Nik Ribianszky

Dr Nik Ribianszky specialises in 18th and 19th century U.S. and African American history, women and gender history, and race relations with particular focus on the experiences of enslaved and free people of color in the South. 

Her book Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (UGA Press, 2021) tells the stories of free Black people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom in a slave society. There is also a companion website to her book which showcases this population and gives additional resources about them. Ribianszky also works with Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a project housed at Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the MSU Department of History and scholars at multiple institutions and is a partner in their National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Expanding Enslaved Hub: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.” Her database on free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi will be linked on Enslaved's platform and make her research available to other scholars of enslaved and free people of color and link this project with data from different geographical regions, an endeavor that gives scholars, the public, and the descendant community access to relevant demographic information. Her next project centers on people of African descent in Ireland from 1600 to 1865.

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Briony Widdis
Briony Widdis

Briony Widdis is a Research Fellow specialising in the intersections of heritage, colonial legacies, and conflict interpretation in museums and archives.

As an anthropologist, her work examines how institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland engage with decolonisation, including in relation to prior experiences of interpreting conflict. She explores curatorial practices, community engagement, and institutional policies, assessing how these shape contemporary decolonial strategies and narratives.

Currently, Briony is working on the legacies of British imperialism in cultural heritage collections through her role in the Historic Houses, Global Crossroads (HHGC) project, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with Queen's University Belfast and several other institutions. Her academic contributions include journal articles, conference papers, and policy-oriented research aimed at fostering inclusive and critically engaged public history research.

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Members

Dominic Bryan is a Professor in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. From 2002-2014 he was Director of the Institute of Irish Studies and is a Fellow of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Research interests include political rituals, symbols, commemoration, public space and identity in Northern Ireland. Dominic specialises in the contemporary history of Belfast and particularly the impact the peace process has had on the city. He works on issues of cultural identity such as flags, parades, bonfires and murals. He is author of Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control (Pluto 2000) and co-author of Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780 (MUP 2019). In 2014 he was co-author of The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest and recently was co-author of Flags: Towards a New Understanding. Dominic is also the Chair of Diversity Challenges and co-Chair of the Commission on Flags Identity, Culture and Tradition.

Dr Elaine Farrell is a historian of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish social history, with a specialism in gender history (particularly women’s history) and crime and punishment. She has been involved in a number of public history projects, including museum exhibitions ‘Research in Translation’ (University of Leicester) and ‘Mad or Bad’ (Armagh County Museum). Working with Leanne McCormick (Ulster University), she is currently preparing an exhibition based on their AHRC-funded project ‘“Bad Bridget”: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’. She has contributed to a number of television programmes for BBC, Channel 4, RTÉ, and TG4.

Dr Derek Johnston teaches on the broadcast media, with a particular focus on genre studies and on the history of broadcasting. His research to date has tended to look at genres and their development as aspects of cultural change, as expressions of the historical shifts and continuities in popular culture. This focus has been on science fiction on British television, particularly in the period of the BBC monopoly from 1936-1955, and on the seasonal horror story. More broadly, he is interested in the uses of historical narratives, both factual and fictional and including history-made-fantastical, and the ways that they are used and form a part of personal and public history and so influence understanding and conceptualisation of history and its relation to the present.

Keith Lilley is Professor of Historical Geography in the School of Natural & Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast. His particular research interests lie in the history of cartography, urban morphology, and landscape history, and in using maps and mappings to explore past landscapes and geographies as well as visualise how the past connects with the present. He has more than ten years' experience of directing spatial humanities research projects, all using digital 'geospatial technologies' (e.g. GIS) to engage wider public audiences. He is director of an AHRC-funded public engagement centre, "Living Legacies 1914-18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future", which connects academic and community researchers through WW1 heritage projects - including 'citizen history' and community mapping projects. He is also Chair of the Historic Towns Trust, a UK charity that oversees the production of the British Historic Towns Atlas programme.

Fearghal McGarry is professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is interested in the theory and practice of public history, particularly in relation to commemoration and other forms of historical memory. Editor (with Jennie Carlsten) of Film, History and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), he led two AHRC research projects exploring the relationship between history and film. He acted as historical consultant on several projects marking the centenary of the Easter Rising, including the GPO Witness History interpretive centre. His current AHRC-funded project, A Global History of the Irish Revolution, will involve collaborations with public history partners to mark the centenary of partition and independence. He is also working with the Ulster Museum to redevelop its Troubles gallery.