PhD Students
| Sinead Burns is a History PhD candidate researching the photographic representation of working-class communities in west Belfast between 1969 and 2005. Her research employs a visual and oral history approach to the examination of a range of photographic collections including press, documentary, community, and family photography. The thesis resituates photography within an active context that considers how photographs engaged with other representations of west Belfast and its people; how they were connected to social, cultural, political, economic, and material systems; and how they engaged with processes like conflict, deindustrialization, and social upheaval. The project addresses the lack of historiography relating to the social history of west Belfast and has used photography to explore important themes including conflict, deindustrialization, community arts, and histories of childhood and the family in working-class communities in this part of the city. |
| Savannah Dodd is a PhD candidate in anthropology. Her research aims to understand the processes of constructing photography archives in Northern Ireland, focusing particularly on the employment of ethical regimes when decisions are made in the archival process. Furthermore, by investigating the meaning of truth in photography and in archives, the evidentiary quality of photographs, the affective force of photographs, and the relationships between photographs, archives, and memory, her PhD research will look at the impact of photography archives on how Northern Irish society creates narratives about its history. She is the founder and Director of the Photography Ethics Centre, which seeks to raise awareness of photography ethics through educational training programmes. |
| Shonagh Joice is a PhD History candidate studying women's experiences of shipbuilding decline in Glasgow and Belfast, 1970-2000. Using the two locations as case studies, Shonagh's research employs an oral history methodology to explore the diverse familial experiences of deindustrialization. The thesis aims to expand the scope of deindustrialization studies to the domestic setting to understand how gendered structures changed, how family units responded to precarity and if inter-generational experiences of decline varied. By placing women at the forefront, the thesis enriches understanding of working-class family life during a highly precarious time period. |
| Joy McClean is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies. Her research conceptualises history exhibitions as translations of the past, with curators being understood as translators. This framework allows for the analysis of the different semiotic modes of meaning-making that exist within the exhibition space, and how they combine to mediate the overall narrative(s) as chosen by the curator. It also allows for a dissection of the role of the curator as one that is precariously balanced between being an authoritative meaning-maker and a dialogic intermediary between the museum and their audiences. In particular, Joy’s research applies this conceptual framework to exhibitions on the difficult past in the national museums of Germany and Northern Ireland, two countries where present national identity is very much laden with the memory of the difficult past. In this way, her research investigates how these nations translate the difficult past within the national museum as a means of constructing and processing identity in the present. |
| Naomi Petropoulous is a PhD History candidate studying the history of the shirt-making industry of Derry. Her thesis is titled “The Original Derry Girls: The Women of the Shirt Factories of Derry 1951 – 1991”. By utilising oral history and written testimony from former shirt factory workers, Naomi’s research explores working class women’s experiences in Derry during an era of deindustrialisation. The thesis addresses themes such as class, gender, identity, deindustrialisation and industrial heritage in a city that was greatly impacted by the violence of the Troubles from 1969 onwards. Naomi’s research interests include the city of Derry, deindustrialisation, gender, oral history, heritage studies, memory studies and the Troubles of Northern Ireland. |
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Isa Sprethuber is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student working with National Museums NI. Her project, Conflict and Creativity, evaluates the potential of the Ulster Museum’s Troubles and Beyond collection to foster creative thinking skills for young people aged 11-14 from across different religious, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds from non- integrated schools. It seeks to address the gap in understanding around how museum education can be designed to influence the development of the skills that are likely to lead to greater levels of social cohesion and peacebuilding. Research activity will include the implementation of a pilot study in communities linked to the ‘Innovation Zones’, which will be evaluated to assess its effectiveness in developing creative skills and open-mindedness in the young participants from disadvantaged backgrounds. The findings of the research will contribute to the development of the Ulster Museum’s Troubles-related education programmes.
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| Matthew Stanton is a PhD History candidate studying Early-Modern British History. His thesis is titled 'Charisma and Controversy: Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) and the Debate about Congregational Song.' His research focus is Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) concerning his works in the hymn-controversy of the late seventeenth-century. There is a lack of scholarship focused on the development of this controversy, particularly regarding the previous singing disputes found in baptistic congregations. By identifying this as a gap in scholarship, he is looking into the origins of Baptist song. He also considers Keach's hymns by surveying their content and effect later felt by key eighteenth-century English hymn-writers such as Isaac Watts (1674-1748). He is the creator of the Benjamin Keach Journal, an online database. |
| Emma Taylor is a History PhD candidate in QUB, and recipient of the John Beecher Memorial Prize for best overall academic performance in the History MA. Her research project is titled 'Vanished Veterans: The multifaceted reasons for minimal historical representation and public commemoration of disguised female American Civil War memorialization. This includes battlefield, monuments, films, novels, and podcasts. Concurrently, it analyses their position within Civil War historiography. When contrasted, their historiographical absence, and/or negative representation, highlights a significant discriminatory trend within the discipline of history. That is, the exclusionary practice of selecting who/what is deserving of a place in academic and public knowledge. |