Committee

	Professor Olwen Purdue (Director) 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.
	Professor Sean O’Connell (Asst Director) 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)
	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.
	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).
	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.
	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.
	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 http://reframingimperialwar.net examines the use of early photography in the development of visual vocabularies through which British imperialism in Asia was understood.