Vanessa interned at the Centre between September and December 2015 and spent September 2019-February 2020 as a visiting researcher from University of Brighton where she is currently finalising her PhD project.

Vanessa studied History and English at the University of Graz, Austria, at Maynooth University, Ireland and at West Virginia University, United States. She completed the diploma programme at the University of Graz with a thesis on “The Rising, the Somme and the Agreement: Political Memories in Northern Irish History Education”. The internship contributed greatly to the quality of her research project, as she could draw from QUB’s extensive resources in the field, participate in workshops, attend conferences and conduct fieldwork in addition to gaining direct insight into everyday life in contemporary Northern Ireland while living in Belfast.

“Conducting research in Belfast allowed me to see the underlying complexities behind the influence competing narratives about the past continue to have on formal history education in Northern Ireland.” More recently, Vanessa has been interested in the transcultural aspects of processes of memory contestation and transformation facilitated by societal factors. She is currently in the early stage of conducting research for her PhD project with the working title “Contestation and Transformation of Memory Cultures: The Impact of Social Divisions on Memory Building”. Vanessa is currently a PhD student at the University of Brighton.