Our fellows/postdocs
Maurice J Casey is a Research Fellow on this AHRC-funded project, working alongside Dr Tom Hulme, Dr Leanne McCormick and Dr Charlie Lynch. Maurice specialises in radical history, transnational history and queer history. He is interested in how each can transform our understanding of Ireland and its diaspora in the early 20th century.
Dr Michele Crepaz is an Illuminate Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast with a focus on comparative politics and public policy. His areas of specialisation are Interest Group Politics and Transparency Research.
While the first focuses on the examination of interest organisations' influence on public policy, the second explores the way in which contemporary governments have opened to public scrutiny through open data and other tools. Michele is also an affiliated scholar at the Good Lobby.
She has produced research on oral history, mother and baby institutions, abortion, and the legal reform of reproductive rights in the UK. Her fellowship examines Northern Irish women’s experiences of unmarried pregnancy, including gestation, labour, motherhood, mother and baby homes, postnatal care, abortion, adoption, and miscarriage. This project will utilise oral history to analyse women’s experiences of unmarried pregnancy itself, as well as the long-lasting effects of the stigma and trauma that often followed.
Dr Clara Fischer works in the areas of social and political theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. She is a Vice-Chancellor Illuminate Fellow at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast.
She has research interests in feminist-pragmatism, theories of emotion/affect, embodiment and shame, institutionalisation and containment, Irish feminisms, and gender and austerity. She has published widely in her interdisciplinary research area, including in journals such as Hypatia, Signs, and Feminist Review.
Her current research is on gender, emotion, and public policy, with a focus on “women and the politics of crisis.”
View full profile Dr Clara Fischer
A psychologist by training, Connair Russell is a Research Fellow on the Explaining Atheism project working alongside Dr. Jon Lanman and collaborators at other institutions. The interdisciplinary Explaining Atheism project looks to examine the causal factors underlying non-belief, putting popular and scientific theories of atheism to the test.
Dr Hiroki Shin is a social and cultural historian of energy, transport and the environment, focusing on the nineteenth century to the present. He is a Vice-Chancellor Illuminate Fellow at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast.
He is interested in the historical development of modern energy technology and the impact of energy-intensive societies on culture, everyday life and the natural environment in the Global South and North.
View full profile Dr Hiroki Shin
Amanda Slevin is Policy Fellow with the ESRC-funded Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN). Amanda co-established and supports development of Belfast Climate Commission and its working groups; she co-founded and chairs the Commission's Community Climate Action Working Group.
Amanda also chairs the PCAN Citizen Engagement Working Group and the Climate Coalition Northern Ireland. Co-Director of QUB's Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action, Amanda initiated and co-convenes QUB's first Faculty AHSS interdisciplinary module on sustainability and climate breakdown ('What is to be done? Sustainability, climate change and just energy transitions in the Anthropocene', PAI 1010).
Amanda is Principal Investigator for 'Mapping Community Climate Action' (participatory action research on community climate action in the Belfast City Region, co-developed with Community Climate Action Working Group members), 'Pathways for Sustainability' (qualitative research with QUB staff and students on QUB teaching and learning on the Sustainable Development Goals, Co-Investigators are Prof. John Barry and Dr Colin McClure), and 'Creating our Vision for a Greener Future' (a staff-student collaboration focused on using arts-based methods to engage members of the public around climate breakdown, sustainability and just transition).
View full profile Dr Amanda Slevin
Ka Ka Katie Tsang is a Research Fellow on an ESRC funded collaboration between University College London, the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre, University of Glasgow, the Wales Centre for Public Policy and Queens University Belfast known collectively as IPPO.
Ka Ka specialises in the study of marginalised communities, the social impacts of public policy and has extensive experience in community consultation projects including hate crime, LGBT+ rights and education research. Ka Ka’s work at the International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO) will involve engagement with local stakeholders, NI policymakers to meet national and international policy demands.
Yana Volkova graduated from Odesa I.I.Mechnikov National University (Ukraine), Department of International Relations. Her current research is dedicated to comparative analyses of technologies of instrumentalization of transborder ethnic ties applied by different kin-states, including Turkey and Russia.
She was doing a PhD project on Turkish diaspora engagement policy and the Turkish minority in Bulgaria and obtained a PhD in Political Science in 2018. During the project "Knowledge exchange and academic cultures in the humanities. Europe and the Black Sea Region" (Horizon2020), she researched the correlation between knowledge and power and its reflection in migration flows and political developments in the Black Sea Region. During the fellowship at the National Academy of Science of Azerbayjan (2019) the focus of the research was on Turkish nationalism and Turkey’s kin-state policy. A more recent research interests include the relations between kin states and kin minorities in Eastern Europe, particularly the mechanisms of engagement and mobilization of external populations by their kin states.
Lisa Claire Whitten is Research Fellow on this ESRC-funded project. The purpose of this research is to identify and explain the consequences of new governance arrangements established in Northern Ireland as a result of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union – ‘Brexit’.
In this ESRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Briony Widdis will survey collections from the Arctic, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania in museums, examine their significance to Northern Irish identities in the present, and undertake collaborative research bridging museums, academics and communities.
The project is underpinned by partnership with the Centre for the Study of Historic Houses and Estates at the University of Maynooth, Irish Museums Association, National Museums NI and Northern Ireland Museums Council.
View full profile Dr Briony Widdis