Dr Jane Lugea specialises in Stylistics: that is, linguistic analysis of literary and creative language. Her research draws on the Cognitive Sciences and empirical methods of data collection and analysis to explore the relationship between textual features and rhetorical effects. As PI on an AHRC-funded research project, ‘Dementia in the minds of characters and readers’, Jane has investigated a) how dementia is represented in the minds of fictional characters, and b) how the literary representations effect real readers. As such, the project explored the potential of literary language to facilitate awareness and empathy towards lived experiences of the condition. In these ways, Jane’s research involves the Medical Humanities and empirical approaches to literature and reading. She is co-author of the textbook Stylistics: Text, Cognition, Corpora (Lugea and Walker, forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan).

Oliver Dunnett is a senior lecturer in human geography at Queen’s University Belfast, specialising in cultural, historical and political geography. His research focuses on the ways in which the cultures and politics of outer space, science and technology are connected to questions of place, landscape and identity in a variety of local, regional and national contexts. He has explored these ideas through topics such as the moral geographies of light pollution, the ethics of space exploration, and the history of outer space in geography. 

Prof Keith Lilley is a geographer with particular research interests in the connections between maps and landscapes.

Recently, Lilley has focused on 'the field' as a site of cartographic production (and consumption) and the survey practices which not only created maps in the past but also shaped local landscapes. This involves adopting methods encompassing fieldwork and archival study. Current funded research exploring this theme include an AHRC-IRC project, "OS200", with the University of Limerick and Royal Irish Academy on the Ordnance Survey in Ireland (go.qub.ac.uk/IrelandMapped) and a recent project called "Surveying Empires" in collaboration with the University of Calcutta, funded by the British Academy (surveyingempires.org).

Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on intellectual life in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on themes of gender, material culture and domestic space. She is currently working on a second monograph for Manchester University Press, entitled A Culture of Curiosity: Scientific Enquiry in the Eighteenth-Century Home. Leonie works collaboratively with scholars from other disciplines and through these partnerships is working on projects concerned variously with ageing, cultures of care and practices of material attention. 

Caroline Sumpter has research interests in evolutionary, psychological and anthropological approaches to literature in the nineteenth century. She has published articles on the relationship between morality and evolution in the work of Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Richard Jefferies, on William Morris and anthropology, and on Andrew Lang and psycho-folklore. Her monograph The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale included an exploration of the ways teenaged girls, working-class children and gay and socialist readers engaged with the ‘science’ of folklore (including debates over evolution). She has written extensively on the relationship between periodicals and science in the nineteenth century, and is completing a book on evolution, ethics and journalism in the 1890s.

Diarmid's research interests include the cultural history and geographies of the life and earth sciences, with a particular emphasis on religious engagements with scientific developments during the long nineteenth century. His recent work has centred on public speech as a situated mode of interaction between science and culture in the nineteenth century. Diarmid has just completed a project investigating debates about evolution and theology in the early twentieth century. This was part of a larger John Templeton Foundation-funded project on conjunctive explanations in science and religion. His current research is concerned with the historical geography of modern ideas about what it means to be human. 

Dr M. Satish Kumar, FRGS, RCS, FHEA was the former Director of Queen’s Academy India and Director for Internationalisation at the School of Natural and Built Environment. He is a Fellow at the The Senator George J Mitchell Institute at Queen’s University Belfast. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Member of the Royal Commonwealth Society. He is a leading international expert on colonial and postcolonial studies focused on South Asia, covering many areas across social sciences and humanities. His knowledge and expertise are widely sought by Governments, charities, and other national and international organisations. He is also extensively involved in the academic community as a Member of the UK Peer Review Colleges for AHRC-GCRF and Newton Fund, Carnegie Funds, STRIDE and SPARC (India). He held Visiting Professorships in Banaras Hindu University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, and was recently nominated to the COP26 UKRI AHRC Panel, 2021. 

Ashok Malhotra is a Senior Lecturer in British Imperial History. Malhotra is the author of Making British Indian Fictions, 1772-1823, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. He has published peer-reviewed articles in journals that specialize in such diverse fields as nineteenth century literature, food studies, South Asia area studies, cultural history, book history and the history of religion. He is currently working on his forthcoming monograph which examines how the early twentieth century Indian Medical Service in British India's nutritional and agricultural research influenced discourses pertaining to nutrition, the environment and race in Britian, colonial India and Northern America. In relation to the Science and Culture Research Group, he has published two articles: 'Cutting Edge Research in the Contact Zone: The Establishment of the Nutritional Laboratories in Coonoor, 1925-27' in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2021) and 'Race, Diet and Class: Robert McCarrison's Laboratory Experiments in Coonoor, 1925-27' in Food Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal (2019).

David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of several books including The Geographical Tradition, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, Putting Science in its Place, Adam’s Ancestors, and Dealing with Darwin. He is currently working on a history of ideas about climate and culture, to be published by Princeton University Press, entitled The Empire of Climate. He was awarded an OBE in 2002 and a CBE in 2019, and has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. 

Dr Ian Campbell is senior lecturer in early modern Irish History. He has published in the fields of the history of political thought and the history of race, and he is interested in early modern universities as sites of scientific and cultural transmission. His current research has been funded by the European Research Council (https://war-and-supernature.com/), and has appeared in Irish Historical Studies, Archivium Hibernicum, the Historical Journal, the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Cambridge History of Ireland. His book Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race: The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 2013), analyses the relationship between the early modern sciences of medicine and theology to heredity and ethnicity. He is currently writing a history of Franciscan political thought in early modern Rome, that identifies the Jewish family as a vital locus for European political thought.

Dr. Gemma Carney is a social gerontologist and senior lecturer in social policy at Queen’s University Belfast. Gemma has been researching the science and culture of ageing since her first job as Policy Analyst at the Irish Senior Citizen’s Parliament in 2007. Since then she has been working on or leading a range of inter-disciplinary projects on ageing, often with artists, writers or humanities scholars such as Leonie Hannan (see The Lively Project). Gemma is active in British gerontology serving on various committees which promote the study of ageing including the editorial board of Ageing & Society. Her book Critical Questions for Ageing Societies (with Paul Nash, University of Southern California) offers a thought-provoking introduction to longevity and was nominated for the Richard Kalish award (Gerontological Society of America) in 2021. She is currently Co-Investigator on the Dementia in the Minds of Characters and Readers project.

As a visual artist, Karen Rann's work is place specific. Her 'Artist in Residence' positions have included work with the National Trust for Scotland (2013-2014), Creative Scotland's 'Year of Natural Scotland', Gairloch Heritage Museum (2011 and 2013) and Kulturtage Oldenburg in Germany. Her research into the history of contour lines on maps has resulted in a collaboration with the John Muir Trust on The Great Lines Project (2014-2016), funded by the Art Council England and the Lines of Attraction Project (2018) a Creative Scotland funded project (2018). An abiding interest in contour lines took an academic turn in 2018, research now encompasses cartography, geography, and histories of ‘space and place’. Rann is currently a PhD student in the Geography Department at Queen’s, the draft title for her thesis is The Art of Contouring: Towards a Creative Historical Geography of Contour Lines in Britain and Ireland, 1778–1860. 

Hiroki Shin is a historian of energy, transport and the environment from the nineteenth century to the present. Dr Shin’s research has explored past energy transitions by considering both hard factors (energy markets, resource politics, infrastructure) and soft factors (consumer culture, social acceptance, everyday practices) with an eye toward mobilising historical research to inform public discussions and actions on today’s global challenges, particularly climate change. His research interests include the diffusion of energy technology, the social impacts of energy disruption, variations in energy transition paths and energy consumer movements. Dr Shin has also been involved in science communication and public history as a means of intervening in contemporary energy policy and practice  – his recent publication includes Energy Communication Toolkit. In his ongoing project, Dr Shin works with cultural sectors from museums to artist groups to envisage proactive roles that cultural institutions can play in global society’s adaptation to climate change.

Matthew is a part-time PhD candidate specialising in historical and cultural geography of planetaria, scientific instruments and astronomy in Ireland. He is researching the planetarium as a place of education, performance and scientific study over the previous century.

Dr. Sarah Baccianti is the Research Manager at National Museums NI. In her role she manages the implementation and development of National Museums NI’s Research Policy and Research Plan and reviews and monitors all research and academic partnerships. Before moving to the museum/heritage sector, Sarah lectured in Old English and Old Norse literature at the University of Oxford, Université de Lausanne, University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Oxford where she researched the narrative structure of chronicles and historiae written in Old Norse, Old English, and Anglo-Latin. Her latest project – which was funded by the British Academy, and that she continues to research in her spare time – focuses on the reception and transmission of scientific and medical knowledge in medieval Denmark and Iceland.