People
Dr Ian Campbell has published extensively on the intellectual history of early modern Ireland, and is currently composing a study of Franciscan political thought in seventeenth-century Rome. This new work is part of a research project, War and the Supernatural in early modern Europe, funded by ERC.
Professor Marie Coleman is a historian of twentieth century Ireland, with particular emphasis of the Irish revolution (1916-1923). Her current research focuses on gender and revolution, the status of ex-combatants and compensation after conflict, and commemoration of the Irish ‘decade of centenaries’.
Dr Kieran Connell is a social and cultural historian of post-war Britain. He is interested in race, immigration, cultural studies, photography and urban history, and teaches modules in these areas. His first monograph is with the University of California Press.
Professor Paul Corthorn’s research and teaching is concerned with twentieth-century British history, especially its political and international dimensions. He has worked extensively on the politics of the Left and on the Cold War in Britain. His book about Enoch Powell, the Conservative and Ulster Unionist MP, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. He is Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project on 'Conservatism and Unionism in the UK, 1968-1997', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Dr Niamh Cullen has particular interests in modern Italy, in the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth-century southern Europe, the history of the emotions and the history of motherhood.
Dr John Curran is a student of ancient religion, particularly polytheism, Judaism and Christianity. He has published works on paganism and Christianity in fourth-century Rome, the Jews under Roman rule and the Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus. He teaches courses on the Roman republic, empire and Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean.
Professor James Davis's research focus is medieval social and economic history, particularly markets, trade and towns. His first major project examined the market culture of medieval England and his current research examines street life from an interdisciplinary perspective. James teaches on topics ranging from the Black Death to urban life and the pre-modern family.
Dr Aglaia De Angeli is a sinologist specialising in social and law history of Republican China. She is part of the Sir Robert Hart Project at Queen’s and works also on historical photography in China. She continues to publish on Sino-Western relationship, especially between China and Italy, France and Ireland on law, diplomats and silk.
Dr Scott Dixon’s research interests to this point have included the study of religion in early modern Europe, with a particular emphasis on the German lands, and the history and the historiography of the Protestant Reformation. At present he is engaged in a cultural history of the early modern German forest.
Dr Simon Egan’s research focuses on the history and culture of later medieval Ireland. He is particularly interested in (i) exploring the evolving relationship between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and their counterparts in the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland and (ii) investigating how events in this wider Gaelic world shaped the affairs and ambitions of the English and Scottish monarchies, c.1100-c.1600.
Professor Elaine Farrell is an Irish social historian with particular interests in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century crime and punishment, and gender and women's history. She co-leads the AHRC-funded project, 'Bad Bridget': criminal and deviant Irish women in North America, 1838-1918. She teaches modules on deviance and criminality, gender and social history.
Professor Peter Gray's research specializes in the history of British-Irish relations c.1800-70, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845-50 and the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. He has recently completed a history of the origins and implementation of the 1838 Irish Poor Law Act.
Professor Crawford Gribben has research interests in the history of religion, with current projects including a short book on John Owen’s spiritual lives, a study of J.N. Darby and the birth of dispensationalism, and a more popular account of Ireland’s Christian history. He teaches modules in early modern British history and apocalypticism.
Dr Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic world in the period, c. 1660-1830. Her research and teaching focus on themes of gender, material culture and intellectual life and she is a public historian with a professional background in museums and heritage.
Dr Andrew Holmes is an authority on Irish Protestantism from the seventeenth century to the present day. His teaching covers the religious and political history of Britain and Ireland during that period and he has published extensively on the history of Presbyterianism and evangelicalism, including two Oxford University Press monographs.
Dr Tom Hulme is a historian of Britain with a US comparative focus. His research is in two strands. Firstly, urban culture (1880-1940): civic culture; citizenship; education; architecture; and festivals. Secondly, the place of the past (c. 1800-present): historical re-enactment; popular history; and commemoration. He teaches modules on both of these strands.
Dr Kelly’s research focuses on the complicated relationship between labour relations and race antagonism in US history, with a special focus on the post-emancipation US South. This research has particular relevance to discussions around the enduring salience of race and inequality in the modern United States and the wider Atlantic world. His current teaching and research focuses on the aftermath of slave emancipation in the United States and beyond, across the plantation societies of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He is willing to supervise projects and only related topics, and on his wider interests in left historiography and the history of worker’s movements internationally.
Dr Danny Kowalsky is a transnational historian of 20th Century Europe, focusing on the period between the wars (1919-1939), the Second World War, the Holocaust and the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War. He currently teach modules on the Holocaust, the Second World War, and Europe between the Wars.
Dr Ashok Malhotra began his career examining British fictional representations of India, as well as the way in which these texts were disseminated to locales within the British Empire and beyond. His current project examines the ways in which British Indian colonial medical research influenced discourses pertaining to nutrition, class and race.
Professor Chris Marsh is a social and cultural historian of England during the period 1500-1750, with particular interests in music, religion, social relations and gender. His most recent book was Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010). He teaches courses on popular culture, family relations and the history of museums.
Dr Ciarán McCabe’s research and teaching is concerned with the social history of poverty and welfare in Ireland and Britain, 1750-1950. His publications include Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2018) and (as co-editor) Dublin and the Great Irish Famine (UCD Press, 2022), as well as forthcoming chapters in the Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism and Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Poverty.
Professor Fearghal McGarry works on 20th-century Ireland. His research and teaching focuses on politics, violence and culture in revolutionary and independent Ireland. He is interested in how the past is represented through commemoration, films, and museums. He is leading a research project exploring the Irish revolution in a global context.
Dr Eric Morier-Genoud is a historian of Africa and empire. His work focuses on religion, politics, war and conflict-resolution. He has published extensively on the history of missionaries, the Catholic Church, Protestantism, and Islam in Africa. His most recent work is on the history of the civil war in Mozambique.
Professor Margaret O'Callaghan works on cultural identity in the Irish Free state; crime, nationality and the law in Victorian Ireland; the high politics of Britain in Ireland since 1880; Irish political thought; women in independent Ireland; Roger Casement; genealogies of partition ; the politics of commemoration; the ‘pre-Troubles’ Troubles.
Professor Sean O'Connell is a social historian of modern Britain and Ireland. Teaching specialisms include working-class communities, contemporary Britain, and oral history. He is editor of Oral History and founder of QUOTE Hub. Current projects are a monograph on the history of joyriding and an oral history of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries.
Professor Sinéad O’Sullivan’s research interests are in Carolingian history and the reception of classical, biblical and late antique texts in the early medieval West. Her current work investigates the significance of glosses for mainstream intellectual history.
Dr Laura Pfuntner works on the history and material culture of the Roman Mediterranean. She has a particular interest in the Roman history of Sicily and the development of its urban communities under the Principate. She has offered modules on Pompeii, Greek and Hellenistic history, and the history of the ancient city.
Professor Olwen Purdue is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland with a focus on social class, power and agency. Currently working on urban poverty, welfare and public health, and the relationship between state and family in industrial Belfast. Research interests also include public history, heritage and identity in Northern Ireland.
Dr Emma Reisz is an imperial and transnational historian focused on globalisation and the British presence in Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. She has published on South and Southeast Asia, but now works mostly on China. She is joint PI on the Sir Robert Hart Project.
Dr Nik Ribianszky’s research interests are pre-Civil War US history, particularly focused on free blacks, race relations, and gender history. Her current book projects include Contested Freedom: Movement and Gendered Violence among Free People of Color in Natchez, Mississippi, 1779-1865.
Dr Hiroki Shin is a social and cultural historian of energy, transport and the environment from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. His current research interests include the history of energy-themed exhibitions, energy culture, past and future energy transitions and the public history of energy.
Dr Alex Titov is interested in importance of national identity for foreign policy and domestic politics. His main research areas are Russian foreign policy; history of nationalism, specifically debates about Russian identity in the 20th century; and political history of the Soviet Union and Russia from the death of Stalin to now.
Professor Diane Urquhart is a gender historian with a special interest in modern Ireland and Britain. She specialises in political and legal history particularly women’s first entry into politics from the late-nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-Irish political patronage and Ireland's history of abortion and divorce.
Professor Wil Verhoeven’s general research field can be described as the study of structures of continuity and rupture in the Age of Revolution and Enlightenment in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800. Consistently marrying archival research with cultural theory, and historiography with the history of ideas, his work explores the evolving symbiosis between historical event and historical consciousness, between power and knowledge, agency and identity.
Dr Keira Williams is the author of Gendered Politics in the Modern South (2012) and Amazons in America (2019). Her current research interests include popular culture, feminism, race, and crime in the twentieth century U.S. She teaches courses on these topics and on the American South.
Research Fellows
Research Fellow
AHRC Funded Project: Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Project: Invisible Labour: an oral history of unmarried pregnancy in Northern Ireland, 1945-1990
Honorary Professor
Professor David Armitage is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, Harvard University, and an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast.
Emeritus Professors
Peter Bowler is writing a survey of the long Darwinian Revolution told from the perspective of popular science literature. His last book was Progress Unchained: Ideas of Evolution, Human History and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Sean Connolly's research has covered different aspects of Irish history between the late seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, looking in particular at religious, political and cultural identities. His most recent books were a study of civic culture in Belfast since the late eighteenth century, and an overview of the Irish diaspora, seeking to put the massive redistribution of Irish men and women around the globe that has taken place over the past two hundred years in an international context.
Marie Therese Flanagan’s research interests lie in twelfth-century Ireland. She has published extensively on political and religious history, spanning the conventional historiographical division marked by Anglo-Norman intrusion into Ireland in 1169. She is currently preparing an edition of the charters of Strongbow and his family.
David Hayton, MRIA, has written mainly on Irish and British history in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most recent book, a biography of the historian Sir Lewis Namier, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize (2020), and he is currently at work on a study of parliamentary elections in Ireland 1689-1761, for which he was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.
Liam Kennedy is an historian of 19th and 20th century Irish history. His recent books relate to Irish religious demography, the Great Irish Famine, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. His current research explores human rights in a divided society and social change in 20thC rural Ireland.
Professor O'Dowd's research interests focus on gender and social history in early modern Ireland. She was a founding member of the Women's History Association of Ireland and served as president of the International Federation for Research in Women's History, 2000-2005. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and was elected to the office of Secretary of the Academy in 2021. Her most recent book is Marriage in Ireland, 1660-1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), co-authored with Maria Luddy.