Academic Staff

Dominic Bryan is a Professor in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. From 2002-2014 he was Director of the Institute of Irish Studies and is a Fellow of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Research interests include political rituals, symbols, commemoration, public space and identity in Northern Ireland. Dominic specialises in the contemporary history of Belfast and particularly the impact the peace process has had on the city. He works on issues of cultural identity such as flags, parades, bonfires and murals. He is author of Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual Tradition and Control (Pluto 2000) and co-author of Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780 (MUP 2019). In 2014 he was co-author of The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest and recently was co-author of Flags: Towards a New Understanding. Dominic is also the Chair of Diversity Challenges and co-Chair of the Commission on Flags Identity, Culture and Tradition

Dr Elaine Farrell is a historian of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish social history, with a specialism in gender history (particularly women’s history) and crime and punishment. She has been involved in a number of public history projects, including museum exhibitions ‘Research in Translation’ (University of Leicester) and ‘Mad or Bad’ (Armagh County Museum). Working with Leanne McCormick (Ulster University), she is currently preparing an exhibition based on their AHRC-funded project ‘“Bad Bridget”: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’. She has contributed to a number of television programmes for BBC, Channel 4, RTÉ, and TG4.

Dr Derek Johnston teaches on the broadcast media, with a particular focus on genre studies and on the history of broadcasting. His research to date has tended to look at genres and their development as aspects of cultural change, as expressions of the historical shifts and continuities in popular culture. This focus has been on science fiction on British television, particularly in the period of the BBC monopoly from 1936-1955, and on the seasonal horror story. More broadly, he is interested in the uses of historical narratives, both factual and fictional and including history-made-fantastical, and the ways that they are used and form a part of personal and public history and so influence understanding and conceptualisation of history and its relation to the present.

Keith Lilley is Professor of Historical Geography in the School of Natural & Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast. His particular research interests lie in the history of cartography, urban morphology, and landscape history, and in using maps and mappings to explore past landscapes and geographies as well as visualise how the past connects with the present. He has more than ten years' experience of directing spatial humanities research projects, all using digital 'geospatial technologies' (e.g. GIS) to engage wider public audiences. He is director of an AHRC-funded public engagement centre, "Living Legacies 1914-18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future", which connects academic and community researchers through WW1 heritage projects - including 'citizen history' and community mapping projects. He is also Chair of the Historic Towns Trust, a UK charity that oversees the production of the British Historic Towns Atlas programme.

Fearghal McGarry is professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is interested in the theory and practice of public history, particularly in relation to commemoration and other forms of historical memory. Editor (with Jennie Carlsten) of Film, History and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), he led two AHRC research projects exploring the relationship between history and film. He acted as historical consultant on several projects marking the centenary of the Easter Rising, including the GPO Witness History interpretive centre. His current AHRC-funded project, A Global History of the Irish Revolution, will involve collaborations with public history partners to mark the centenary of partition and independence. He is also working with the Ulster Museum to redevelop its Troubles gallery.

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.

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, noverls, 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.