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  • Find a PhD Supervisor

Find a PhD Supervisor

Professor Olwen Purdue

School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics
Olwen Purdue 800x533

Professor Olwen Purdue

School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Professor Purdue works on the social history of Ireland with a focus on urban poverty, welfare and social class. She also works on contested and difficult public histories. Recent books include Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018), Children, Poverty and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast (2024) and Public History in Ireland: Difficult Histories (2024). She was international editor for The Public Historian and is series editor for Routledge’s Global Perspectives in Public History series.

Contact info

  • View Academic Profile
  • o.purdue@qub.ac.uk
  • +44 (0)28 9097 3985

Research Interests

Open to PhD applications in the fields of:

  • Public history in divided societies
  • Difficult and traumatic public histories
  • Community co-production
  • Urban poverty and welfare 1850-1930
  • Working-class lives
  • Urban development and public health

Make a PhD enquiry


Public outreach & key achievements

Professor Purdue is Director of the Centre for Public History at Queen's. She works closely with cultural and heritage organisations locally and internationally, for example as member of the Advisory Board of the Ulster Museum, historical advisor to Titanic Belfast and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Irish Museums Association (2018-22). She has hosted the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Dr Lonnie G. Bunch lll at Queen's, has organised and spoken at a number of events with the Smithsonian and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and has delivered talks on public history in divided societies at universities across the US.

She is currently QUB lead on two funded projects. 'Historic Houses: Global Crossroads' reimagines Ireland's historic houses and estates as spaces where marginalised histories might be amplified and entangled local and global identities explored. 'Our Place, Our Stories' is a community-based oral history and archiving project in which communities on either side of west Belfast's peace walls are working together to create an oral history archive of everyday life in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

Professor Purdue sits on the Council of the Royal Historical Society and chairs the Research Support Committee.


Research students

PhD Title Ireland's lost property: an exploration of the Anatomy Act in London,1828-1907
Name Julie Mathias
Years of Study 2022 - 2025
Country UK
   
PhD Title  Quite capable of being Governor...herself": the Northern Irish Governorship and the influence of the Governors' Wives
Name Katie Tate
Years of Study 2020 - 2023
Country  UK
   
PhD Title  "A Curse of a Disease": Remembering the history and lived experience of type one diabetes through patient memory
Name Lauren Young
Years of Study 2019 - 2022
Country  UK

 


Alumni: Where are they now

PhD Title  The Photographer and the City: The work of A.R. Hogg in representing everyday life in early twentieth-century Belfast
Name Dr Lucy Wray
Years of Study 2018 - 2021
Country  UK
Current Position Faculty Fellow, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University. Formerly Senior Research Associate, University of Bristol
   
PhD Title  Leisure, memory and class in post-war Belfast: a case study of the Templemore Avenue Baths
Name Dr Rhianne Morgan
Years of Study 2019 - 2022
Country  UK
Current Position Assistant Professor, University of North Georgia', USA. Formerly Research Fellow, University of Luxembourg

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  • Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science
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