Our fellows/postdocs

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.

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

Frank Kennedy is currently Research Assistant working as part of an interdisciplinary team on an ESRC funded project, 'The Sterling Area Revisited: The Political Economy of International Economic Disintegration'.
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Drew Mikhael is Research Fellow with the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust project Transforming Divided Societies into Welcoming Communities. Drew has focused his research on the marginalisation of newcomer groups into ethnically divided societies that are managed by consociational power-sharing systems.
In his work Drew is interested in the social and institutional drivers of marginalisation of newcomer communities. Drew employs collaborative and participatory research methods with marginalised groups to ensure that participants of the project are left with tangible outputs for their engagement. This can include leading capacity building workshops, creating action plans for addressing problems in networks and co-creating policy dissemination so that marginalised voices are heard by important stakeholders.
He was previously a Fellow on the ESRC project Exclusion amid Inclusion; he has also contributed significantly to the DfE funded "Civil Conflict in Post-Conflict Societies" conducting fieldwork in Burundi and Lebanon among others.
View full profile Dr Drew Mikhael

Kathleen Miller is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and Queen's University Belfast. Kathleen has published on early modern plague writing, most recently in The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England traces women's role in shaping discourse on pestilence through a survey and analysis of women’s plague writing in England from 1550 to 1700. It investigates how women’s understanding of the disease was gendered and, more broadly, how the textual construction of pestilence was gendered in early modern England.
View full profile Dr Kathleen Miller

Dr Amjed Rasheed works on Middle East Politics and IR, the rise of China and the future of the world system, and the Global South narrative of world Order. He is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast.
Previously, he worked as a visiting lecturer at Tübingen University at the Institute of Political Science and as a postdoctoral fellow at Durham University, School of Government and International Affairs.
Dr. Rasheed is the co-author of Islam, IS and the Fragmented State (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Syrian Crisis, Syrian Refugees (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). Dr. Rasheed has published in the leading journals, such as Middle East Policy and International Spectator. He has been writing for The Guardian, Open Democray, The Conversaiton, and Global Policy.

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

CIT is funded by The Executive Office NI (TEO), in partnership with Co-operation Ireland (CI), and supports eight geographic areas where there has been a history of paramilitary activity and coercive control. Brendan Sturgeon leads an evaluation of CIT and its related projects, on behalf of TEO and CI.
The rolling assessment has included the collection of data in line with each project’s bespoke Outcomes Based Accountability (OBA) framework and via Baseline and Exit Surveys (among other points of enquiry).
View full profile Dr Brendan Sturgeon

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