Affiliated Staff
Affiliated Academic Staff
Professor (Emeritus) Frederick Boal
Fred Boal’s special interest is in ethnic residential segregation in cities. His investigations have particularly focused on Belfast, while he has, in parallel, developed a number of comparative frameworks applicable to the study of ethnic and ethno-national segregation elsewhere, in particular Canada. He was a founding member and the first Director of the Centre of Canadian Studies at Queen’s in 1984.
Dr Michael K. Corman
Mike Corman is a Canadian trained Sociologist, receiving his undergraduate and Master's degrees from the University of Victoria in British Columbia and his Ph.D. from the University of Calgary in Alberta. Prior to coming to Queens University, Dr. Corman was an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Calgary in Qatar (UCQ), Faculty of Nursing. Previously, Mike taught in the Department of Sociology at both the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. His research and teaching interests include the sociology of health and illness, emergency medical services, institutional ethnography, aging, caregiving and autism spectrum disorders, health care work, sociology of the family, gender and sexuality, critical qualitative research strategies, and public health. His current research explores the social organization of emergency medical services, specifically the work of paramedics in Alberta, Canada.
Dr Diarmid Finnegan
Diarmid Finnegan’s research is concerned with science, space and culture in historical perspective. In previous work he examined the reception of glacial theory in early-Victorian Edinburgh, investigated the historical geographies of Scottish natural history societies in the period 1831-1900 and explored the role of geography in the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1831 – c.1933. His book on natural history societies in Victorian Scotland was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2009 and was awarded the Frank Watson Book Prize for Scottish History in 2011 (Guelph Centre for Scottish Studies). He is now embarking on a new project on 'spaces of the human'. This project will explore the historical geography of debates about what it means to be human from the early modern period to contemporary discussions about post-human futures.
Dr Wesley Flannery
Wesley Flannery is a Lecturer in the School of Natural and Built Environment and Institute of Environmental and Spatial Planning (ISEP). His key research interests are in marine spatial planning, integrated coastal zone planning, stakeholder participation in environmental decision-making, public attitudes and behaviours towards the environment and planning for environmental risk management. He is currently undertaking comparative research on approaches to marine spatial planning in Canada and the United States.
Professor Gerard Gormley
Gerry Gormley is based in the Centre for Medical Education (CME), Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He chose to become an academic GP because it allows him to synergise the clinical, research and educational aspects of his job towards the competent and compassionate care of patients. He gained a Doctorate in Medicine relating to medical education and patient care in 2003. He is also a visiting Professor at the Wilson Centre, Toronto, Canada. He leads on community based education in Phase 4 of the undergraduate medical degree programme and heads up the Scholarly Educational Research Network (SERN) [http://go.qub.ac.uk/medSERN] in CME. His main research interests includes assessment of clinical competence and simulation based learning.
Dr Heather Johnson
Heather Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies. She is interested in the politics of migration and border security, and particularly in the shifting international refugee regime and the politics of irregularity and irregular migration. Her work examines how different kinds of geopolitical spaces, particularly at borders, impact and shape the political agency of migrants – and how these impacts are challenged and resisted from the ‘ground level.’ She is interested in the politics of citizenship, nationalism and security, but with a specific focus on those “outside” of our traditional political categories. In pursuit of this, she has conducted field research in refugee camps, detention centres and border areas in Tanzania, Spain, Morocco and Australia. Her current project examines the journeys and routes of migration to and from global border sites. She is part of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University Belfast. Externally, an external researcher with the York Centre for International Security Studies in Toronto, Canada, a member of the Refugee Research Network, and she sits on the executive of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS).
Professor Cathal McCall
Cathal McCall is Professor in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published widely on the theme of European Union cross-border cooperation and conflict transformation. His latest book is The European Union and Peacebuilding: The Cross-Border Dimension (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His current research project is EUBORDERSCAPES funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. He is also Programme Coordinator for the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society (LINCS) at Queen’s which involves 30 doctoral students. Additionally, he is a Research Affiliate on the Borders in Globalization research project which is led by a network of scholars based at 11 Canadian universities.
Professor Jennifer McKinley
Jennifer McKinley’s research and teaching expertise includes analysing ground and remote sensed earth processes, criminal and environmental forensics and weathering, but the recurrent theme is the development and application of spatial analysis techniques (Geographical Information Science and geostatistics) within each of these fields. Research projects in Canada and with Canadian colleagues include using geostatistics to improve mineral explorationmapping and using terrestrial LiDAR for monitoring landslides. Current research uses a compositional data analysis approach to study regional geochemistry. As a Chartered Fellow of the Geological Society of London, she currently holds a number of roles including: Trustee and Council Member of Geological Society of London; Executive Vice President of the International Association of Mathematical Geoscientists (IAMG); Communications Officer for the IUGS-IFG (Initiative on Forensic Geology); and Secretary for the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Geosciences and Geographical Sciences committee.
Professor David Livingstone
David Livingstone has research interests in the comparative reception of Darwinism and in the historical relations between science and religion. He has published on the Canadian encounter with evolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He has worked in particular on the scientific thinking of John William Dawson (Principal of McGill University, 1855-1893) and Daniel Wilson (President of the University of Toronto, 1880-1892); on the impact of Scottish philosophy in Canada; and on debates over Darwin at Knox College during the decades around 1900.
Professor Debbie Lisle
Debbie Lisle is a Professor in International Relations in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics. She has expertise in Critical International Relations with a focus on the intersections between security, technology, mobility, materiality, visuality and culture. Her work examines how dominant accounts of global politics are constituted and reproduced in the cultural realm through visual and narrative forms (e.g. photography, museums, novels, films). She is currently taking that knowledge and examining the conjunction of science, security and materiality at key European border sites. She did her undergraduate degree in Political Science at McGill University, and then her MA in Political Science at the University of Victoria. She has research links with colleagues at the University of Ottawa, University of Victoria, University of York, University of Toronto, McMaster University and Acadia University.
Dr Niall Majury (Director)
Niall Majury is particularly interested in the geographical dynamics that underpin the construction and governance of markets. His published work has explored: the role of disclosure as a legal technology in reshaping the governance of Canadian financial markets; the development of on-screen trading technologies within Canadian stock markets; and the cultural politics of foreign investment within dynamic housing markets in Canada. He is currently working on a project that examines how scientific knowledge of nature is enrolled into systems of valuation and property relations, focusing on the associated knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance in Canada.
Dr Gill Plunkett
Gill Plunkett has worked with tephrochronologists Dr Duane Froese and Dr Britta Jensen from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, on the identification and correlation of North American volcanic ash (tephra) layers in Greenland and Europe. Dr Jensen previously worked in the School on an NSERC-funded project exploring the potential of using tephra records to date Holocene peatlands in northern USA. In collaboration with Dr Terri Lacourse, University of Victoria, Gill is planning to extend the study of distal tephra to peatlands in British Columbia.
Dr Linda Price
Linda Price, formerly of the School of Natural and Built Environment, has worked with Canadian colleagues on approaches to mental health and well-being amongst the farming community. This has seen funded research and publications focussed on considering the nature of rural support. Her work involves working with Canadian and Australian colleagues to develop networks in order to consider emotional, rural geographies and the nature of farming identities and connections to the land, farm and family or the 'farmscape' in global settings and differential agri-economic environments. Current collaborations with the University of Liverpool and colleagues at QUB in the Centre for Medical Education and School of Creative Arts are developing RCUK funding applications with creative interventions such as a play devised from oral history testimony in order to increase knowledge of the culture amongst non-farming communities and provide a training aid for farm support networks. Such cultural, geographic approaches move forward the agenda beyond a medicalisation of a way of life and increases in male, farming suicide to understanding the pull of the historical family story in and of the land in global contexts.
Professor Helen Roe (Deputy Director)
Helen Roe is a physical geographer whose research interests centre around the reconstruction of environmental change in lakes and other wetland environments. She uses a variety of palaeoecological techniques to understand long-term climate change and to address a range of environmental problems. Her recent work has focused on the use of biological groups for biomonitoring and restoration in lakes, particularly in urbanizing settings. She has worked extensively in Canada and has been an Adjunct Research Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, Ottawa since 2003. She is currently involved in projects based in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut (late Holocene climate change), the Toronto region and New Brunswick (water quality degradation). In 2018-19 she was awarded the Ireland Canada University Foundation's James M Flaherty Professorship to work on water quality issues at the Global Water Institute, Carleton University Ottawa.
Professor (Emeritus) Stephen Royle
Steve Royle is an international expert on the geography of small islands. This research has included the historical geographies of company colonies, Vancouver Island and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Books on Canadian research have included: Company, Crown and Colony: The Hudson’s Bay and Territorial Endeavour in Western Canada (2011); Insecurity in Canada’s Past: The Sixth Eccles Centre for America Studies Plenary Lecture (2011); Doing Development Differently: Regional Development on the Atlantic Periphery (2007). He served as the second Director of the Centre of Canadian Studies, stepping down upon his retirement.
Dr Alastair Ruffell
Alastair Ruffell, Reader, is currently working with: Stephen Livingstone (Sheffield) and Dan Utting (Alberta Energy Regulator) on Alberta sub-glacial lakes (NERC funded); and Dave Keighley (New Brunswick) and Grant Wach (Dalhousie) on Carboniferous –Triassic palaeoclimates and wildfires.
Dr Tristan Sturm
Tristan Sturm is a Canadian political geographer with a focus on religion. His work looks at the geopolitics of apocalyptic thought, including climate change, and how religion is imbricated in geopolitical thought. He is currently working on a paper entitled, “Geographies of Legislative Difference: Quebec’s Values Charter and the Unveiling of Muslim.” He also teaches a third-year module on Contested Territory in which the separatist movement in Quebec figures centrally. He is on the editorial board of the journal, American Review of Canadian Studies.