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Our Committee
Chair: Dr Elena Schaa
Elena Schaa is a historian of physics and scholar of the academic study of religion. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and a Postdoc Associate of the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Greece). She has worked as a PostDoc at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, following the completion of her PhD in 2024 at Trinity College Dublin. In her thesis, funded by the IRC Postgraduate Scholarship, Trinity College Dublin, and the Gerade Henkel Stiftung, she investigated the role of religion in the popular science writings of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg.
Secretary: Erin Manson
Erin Manson is a PhD researcher in cultural geography at Queen’s University Belfast and Armagh Observatory and Planetarium. Her research interests include the history of astronomy, the decolonisation of the history of science and the connection between astronomical science and geopolitics. Funded by the Northern Bridge Consortium, her PhD research studies the cultural/political/colonial contextual histories of Ireland’s three enduring astronomical observatories of Armagh, Dunsink and Birr Castle, from their genesis in the long 19th Century Irish Ascendancy tradition, to their international networks in the 20th Century.
Webmaster: vacant
Social Media Manager: Dr Ciara Henderson
Magazine Editorial: vacant
Reading Group: Dr Elena Schaa
Seminar & Events: Dr Adrian Kirwan
Conference Organisers (2026): Dr José M Mareno and Dr Elena Schaa
Active Members
A-B-C
My research interests are in the history of science, medicine and society in the nineteenth century. I have studied popular science and science education in Ireland while my current research focuses on changing human-animal relationships in Dublin. Past publications include Communities of science in nineteenth-century Ireland (Pickering and Chatto, 2009) and, co-edited with Eadaoin Agnew, Science and technology in nineteenth-century Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2011) and articles on environmental history, the history of the Dublin zoo and agricultural education. I teach European history at Dublin City University.
Elizabethanne Boran
Elizabethanne Boran is the Librarian of the Edward Worth Library in Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin. She is the editor of the three volume Correspondence of James Ussher, 1600-1656, published by the Irish Manuscript Commission in 2015, and, in addition, she has written on the history of early modern science, book-collecting, libraries and, more generally, the seventeenth-century history of ideas and universities. She is the Irish member of the Society for the History of Natural History, one of two Irish members of the International Commission for the History of Universities, a member of the Rare Books Group of Ireland, and Secretary of the Irish National Committee of the Blue Shield.
Peter Bowler
Peter J. Bowler is Professor emeritus of the History of Science at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was President of the British Society for the History of Science, 2003-2005. He has an M.A. from Cambridge University, and M.Sc. from the University of Sussex and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has taught at universities in Canada, Malaysia and the United Kingdom. He has published a number of books on the history and impact of evolutionism and is the editor (with Nicholas Whyte) of Science and Society in Ireland: The Social Context of Science in Ireland, 1800-1950. Queen’s University of Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997.
Nuala Caomhonach
https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/faculty/nuala-caomhanach
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Diarmid Finnegan
Diarmid Finnegan is a Reader in Human Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests centre on the cultural history and historical geographies of the life and earth sciences, with a particular emphasis on religious responses to scientific developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and The Voice of Science: British Scientists on the Lecture Circuit in Gilded Age America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). He is co-editor of two collections of essays (Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire (2015) and Conjunctive Explanations in Science and Religion (2023) and, with Roland Jackson and Nanna Kaalund, edited volume 7 of The Correspondence of John Tyndall. He is currently writing a biography of the Scottish evolutionist and evangelist, Henry Drummond (1851-1897), to be published by Edinburgh University Press.
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Ciara Henderson
Dr Ciara Henderson is an interdisciplinary health sciences researcher whose works sits at the intersection between history, sociology and healthcare. She has a specific interest in reproductive loss, and thereby the connected fields of death studies and birth related trauma. Her work explores death, burial and bereavement for adults and babies in both historical and contemporary contexts. Through this and her work exploring Ireland’s institutional models of care, she contributes to cultural understandings of death and improvements in mental health research and and midwifery practice.
https://www.ciarahenderson.com | Bluesky @chendirl.bsky.social
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Nuala Johnson
Nuala Johnson (MRIA) is a Professor Emeritus in Human Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research is both historical and contemporary in focus. She has written extensively on nationalism and the politics of identity; public monuments and collective memory; literary spaces; and the historical geographies of science. Her recent work has been particularly engaged with analyzing the development of botanical gardens and their aesthetics; natural history travel and she is currently working on a project on botanical illustration and empire. She has published extensively in international journals including Journal of Historical Geography, Cultural Geographies, Environment and Planning D. She is author of Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens (I B Tauris 2011) and has edited three further books.
Shelby Zimmerman Keeling
Shelby Zimmerman Keeling holds a PhD in Modern Irish History from Trinity College Dublin. She is a historian of institutions, medicine, death, and poverty. Her PhD research examined the medicalisation of death in the South Dublin Union workhouse. Shelby served as the programme coordinator for Trinity’s Medical and Health Humanities Initiative. She also volunteered at London’s Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret. Shelby is currently the programme coordinator at Ithaca College London Centre.
Adrian Kirwan completed his Ph.D. at the Department of History, NUI, Maynooth in 2017. His research focuses on the interaction between science, technology and society. He currently teaches on that institutions Critical Skills course. He has published articles on the history of science and technology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. He is currently co-editor of volume eleven of the Correspondence of John Tyndall. He is currently the Network’s representative on the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences.
Janka Kormos
Janka Kormos is a scholar in the history of psychology with special remit to the history of movement studies and embodied practices in psychological and medical sciences. Janka curently holds a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cyprus and also serves as the communications officer of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences. In 2023, as a Fulbright scholar, Janka compiled a standalone archival collection for the Polish-Jewish, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Judith S. Kestenberg. The Kestenberg Papers is now housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, USA. Janka has been publishing in Hungarian and English since 2015. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4700-1580
Ezra Kücken
Ezra Kücken is a Research Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship funded PhD student in History at Trinity College Dublin. Their research examines the construction of the colonial sex worker in late 19th-century Hong Kong, situated at the intersection of race, gender, and class. They focus on sex work regulation through the overlapping frameworks of public health, colonial medicine, racialized sexuality, colonial masculinity, imperial capitalism, and the contemporaneous debates on slavery and human trafficking. They are further interested in how both Western and Chinese feminist theories can be employed to approach questions in modern Chinese history. Before starting their PhD at Trinity College Dublin, Ezra completed an MA in History at the Philipps-University of Marburg, the Universidad de Córdoba, and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, as well as a BA in History and East Asian Studies at the Georg-August-University Göttingen.
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Matthew McMahon
Matthew McMahon is a part-time PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast and Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, where he is also the Museum Collections Officer responsible for the archive and historical collection of over 35,000 entries. Specialising in historical and cultural geography and funded by the Northern Bridge Consortium, his research studies the geographies of Armagh Planetarium as a site of the performance of science and spectacle from 1937 to 1995. Some essential questions include: What human networks were essential to the planetarium project? How does a planetarium acquire cultural capital? How does it acquire the authority to speak on scientific matters? How do the technical capabilities of the planetarium impact the performances, and why does it matter? How does a planetarium operate in a divided society? Further research interests include the heritage of astronomy in Ireland through the consideration of material culture and object histories.
John O’Donogue
John O’Donoghue is an educator, researcher and project manager based in Trinity College Dublin. He lectures and coordinates the Science Communication Module for PhD researchers, lectures student science teachers and coordinates professional development courses for established teachers. In addition to his primary research interests in science education and public engagement, he has published two science history books; Where the Irish Spoke of Chemistry (2013) and most recently Onscreen Chemistry: The Portrayal of Chemical Science in Film and TV (2025). His history interests are mainly focussed on the evolution of public perception of science in an Irish and international context.
James Gabriel O’Hara
UCC, Cork, Graduate in Electrical Engineering (1970); M.Sc. (1973) and Ph.D. (1979) in history of science and technology from University of Manchester. Academic / professional historian of science and technology since 1973. Member of IAPH (Irish Association of Professional Historians): http://irishhistorians.ie/members/leibnitz/
See: https://jamesgabrielohara.academia.edu/ and https://jamesgabrielohara.academia.edu/research
Interests: History of Science, Technology and Medicine (17th-19th century)— Irish or Anglo-Irish contributions to Science and Technology (17th-19th century)— Edition of manuscript sources, in particular correspondence of historical personages of science (from Galileo to Einstein)— Leibniz’s correspondence as a treasure-trove of the history of science, technology and medicine.
Thomas Parkinson
Dr Thomas Parkinson is Teaching Fellow in Global History at University College Dublin. His research focusses on communication disability and the speech and hearing sciences. He is broadly interested in the relationship between science, medicine, and disability in colonial, global, and postcolonial contexts. https://people.ucd.ie/thomas.parkinson
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Roger Willoughby
Roger Willoughby is an organisational consultant, clinical psychologist, historian, academic, and writer. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts and holds doctorates in psychoanalytic studies from the University of Kent and the University of Oxford. His specifically psychoanalytic writings include the books Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality (Free Association Books, 2005) and Freud’s British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London (Routledge, 2024), in addition to which he has published papers in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and elsewhere. Current research and writing projects include studies of hypnotism and suggestion with battle casualties during the First World War; religion, violence, and desistance; the development of psychoanalysis in Britain up to 1939; and on Jonathan Hanaghan, the pioneer of psychoanalysis in Ireland. In 2024 he co-founded and is the co-editor of historiesofpsychoanalysis.com.
Past Members
A-B-C
Kelly Adamson
Kelly Adamson is a PhD student at Dublin City University where she was awarded the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship in 2021. Her research interests include the formulation of public health policy in 1940s Ireland with a focus on the following areas: childhood illness, nutrition, tuberculosis (TB) and the institutionalisation of the mentally-ill. In particular, her present research asks why certain diseases may have been prioritised over others, and what this can tell us about the body-politic of the newly independent Irish Free State. Her MA, also awarded by Dublin City University, examined the application of nutrition science in Ireland in the 1940s, including specific analyses of flour extraction on public health and the national nutrition survey. In 2018, she also engaged in research for the Leprosy Mission, an organisation fighting against leprosy and the stigma it brings in developing countries.
James Akpu
James Onochie Akpu recently submitted his PhD dissertation on ‘Irish Missionary Enterprise in Nigeria, 1885-1975’, which examined Irish Catholic missionary activity in the fields of education, healthcare and welfare provision. This was completed in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University under the supervision of Dr Daithí Ó Corráin. Born in Kano in Nigeria, James holds BA and MA in History degrees from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, winning prizes for being the best student at both levels. During his PhD, he was awarded a prestigious Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate scholarship. James’s main research interests are in African history, Ireland-Africa relations, church-state relations, Global Christianity, ecumenism, print culture, British Empire studies, history of medicine, maternal and child health, education in sub-Saharan Africa, history of philanthropy, history of technology, sex/gender history and consumption and environmental history. He is currently working on a new project entitled ‘Catholic Relief Services and Nutrition in Northern Nigeria, 1955-1966’.
Merav Amir
I completed my PhD at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas. My work interests relate to the interactions between technology and society, scientific authority and knowledge production and the regulation of technological innovations by state and non-state entities. My research has explored the social and political implications of the introduction of new security technologies in border settings and in conflict zones. In this research I look at interactions between technologies and the shaping of bodies and identities. Additional research projects of mine examined the political significations of human reproduction and cultural analysis of technological developments with a particular focus on the field of assisted reproductive technologies.
Hannah Brown
Hannah is a historian of disability and medicine and a final year PhD researcher at Ulster University. Her research explores the lived experiences of polio survivors in Northern Ireland, sharing personal narratives often overlooked in medical and social histories. Through her work, Hannah aims to deepen understanding of the long-term impacts of polio and contribute to research on disability, health, and memory.
Alongside her academic work, Hannah is a museum guide at the Museum of Free Derry, where she engages the public with local history and narratives of civil rights and social justice. Hannah is a book review editor’s assistant for the Social History of Medicine journal.
Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown is a final-year PhD student at Ulster University. Her research examines the education and employment experiences of blind citizens in Derry and Belfast between 1800 and 1980, exploring how disability, policy, and social attitudes shaped the lives and opportunities of blind individuals across this period. Beyond her academic work, Rebecca serves as the Social Media Officer for the Museum of Free Derry/Bloody Sunday Trust, where she supports digital outreach and the preservation of community memory.
Margaret Buckley
Margaret Buckley is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D., jointly supervised by the School of Applied Social Studies and the Department of History in University College Cork, Ireland. In 2014, I was awarded an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship for the duration of my doctoral studies. My thesis is titled ‘“A Cure for the Poor”: Anevaluation of welfare provision for the over 50s in Limerick City, 1875 to 1925 through the lens of Death and Dying’. It uses the graveyard records of the City to assess the impact of social policy initiatives on quality of life for the elderly over a pivotal 50 years of Irish history. Previously, using similar primary source material, I have researched the consequences of Spanish Influenza in Limerick City, the effects of a number of childhood epidemics, and the role played by the workhouse and workhouse hospital in the city. I am interested in the historical development of welfare provision, focusing on the fields of epidemiology, housing, healthcare and poverty.
Fiachra Byrne
Fiachra Byrne is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. His current research project is on the mental health of juvenile prisoners in England and Ireland from 1850 to 2000. This comparative study examines the penal practices, legal frameworks, and professional and public discourses relating to the management of the mental health of juvenile prisoners. It also forms a research strand within the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850–2000’, led by co-PIs Dr Catherine Cox (UCD) and Hilary Marland (University of Warwick).
David Ceccarelli
David Ceccarelli has a PhD in Historical, Philosophical and Social Sciences; is a teaching assistant in history of science at the University of Rome Tor Vergata; 2015-2016 CHSTM Research Fellow. My research interests include the history of non-Darwinian evolutionism and the philosophical implications of nineteenth-century debates on epigenetic inheritance and morphology. Currently, I am member of the ESHS (European Society for the History of Science), Res Viva (Interuniversitary research centre for the epistemology and history of life sciences), and of the Group for a New Historiography in Evolution and Current Biology (http://new-history.com/).
Peter Childs
Retired in 2009 from the University of Limerick after a career teaching chemistry and helping to train chemistry teachers. Longstanding interest in the history of chemistry, science education, Irish chemical industry. A particular interest is the Irish kelp/seaweed industry. Editor and publisher of Chemistry in Action! since 1980, a magazine for Irish chemistry teachers. Over the years this has featured biographical articles, places to visit and other historical pieces. Currently writing a series of articles on Pioneers of Science Education for the ISTA journal Science. Recent chapter on Jane Marcet in ‘ Women in their element’ (World Scientific, 2019).
Catherine Cox
Catherine Cox is the Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine of Ireland (CHOMI) at University College Dublin. She currently holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award entitled Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000′ with Professor Hilary Marland at Warwick University. The Award builds on an earlier collaboration with Professor Marland on a Wellcome Trust supported project on Irish migration and mental illness between the Great Famine and Irish Independence which has resulted in a series of articles and a co-edited volume. Her publications include Negotiating insanity in the southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); with Hilary Marland, Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); with Maria Luddy, Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History 1750-1970(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and numerous articles. With Dr Graham Brownlow, she is editor of Irish Economic and Social History.
John Cunningham
John Cunningham is an Associate Research Fellow on the Early Modern Practitioners project at the University of Exeter. In this role, I am part of a team investigating the lives and careers of medical practitioners in England, Wales and Ireland in the period 1500-1715. The key outputs of this research, which is supported by the Wellcome Trust, will be a major monograph and a substantial open-access online database. I hold a PhD from NUI Galway, where I wrote a dissertation on the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements. As well as a number of essays and articles, I have published a monograph entitled Conquest and Land in Ireland: the Transplantation to Connacht, 1649-1680.
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Cara Delay
Cara Delay is Professor of History at the College of Charleston. Her research analyzes the history of women, gender, and culture in Ireland, the American South, and the Atlantic World, with a focus on reproduction and women”s health. Her award-winning body of scholarship includes more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters. Her new book (co-authored with Beth Sundstrom), Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press; and another project, Menstruation: A Global History, is under contract with Polity Press.
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Anna Gasperini
Dr Anna Gasperini is an IRC Laureate at the University of Galway. She researches issues of health related to underprivileged, exposed, and/or powerless groups, mainly the poor and children/young people, focusing on the 19th and early-20th centuries. Her current project MILC, “MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health (1850-1914)”, is a comparative transnational study of medical literature about child health. She has recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions research project on English and Italian nineteenth-century children’s literature and the history of child nutrition. She is the author of Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy – The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Mark Grossman
Mark Grossman is an independent researcher residing in the New York City metropolitan area. His research focuses on the works of Irish chemists William and Bryan Higgins and their possible influence on the development of John Dalton’s atomic theory, as well as the history of Irish meteorites. In addition to publishing in academic journals, he maintains a blog devoted to the history of meteorites and the history of science: meteoritemanuscripts.blogspot.com ; markig@westnet.com
Sue Hemmens
Originally qualified as a biochemist and now Deputy Keeper of Marsh’s Library, Sue Hemmens is working towards a PhD in the area of early modern natural philosophy. Research interests include the history of natural philosophy in the early modern period, with a particular focus on Ireland; the customisation of library discovery interfaces; and the dissemination of music in print and manuscript in eighteenth-century Ireland. More about Sue and her recent publications can be seen here on Marsh’s Library website.
Benjamin Huskinson
Benjamin Huskinson is currently pursuing a PhD in history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on science and religion in popular culture, and his thesis is a new history of anti-evolution movements in the United States after 1960. He holds a B.A. in political science from Washington State University, an M.Sc. in political psychology from Queen’s University Belfast, and an MLitt in American Studies from the University of Glasgow.
Leonie Hannan
Leonie Hannan is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has studied at the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work focuses on Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century and her interests include gender, material culture, intellectual life and histories of home. Leonie has published widely, including the monographs: Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind (Manchester, 2016) and A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home (forthcoming). Follow her on Twitter @LeonieHannan
Tomás Irish
I am Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University. My research interests lie in the cultural history of the First World War and specifically its impact upon universities and intellectual communities. In 2015 I published ‘The University at War 1914-25: Britain, France, and the United States‘. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for War Studies in Trinity College Dublin from 2012-2015, where I also completed my PhD thesis. My second book, ‘Trinity in War and Revolution 1912-1923‘, was published by the Royal Irish Academy Press in October 2015. I was an Ussher fellow at Trinity College from 2007-2010 and was awarded a Postgraduate Scholarship by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the year 2010-2011. In 2009 I was awarded a scholarship by the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne (Somme). In 2013 I was a Craig C. Dobbin research fellow at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. In 2015 I was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In Spring 2015 I was an adjunct lecturer at Maynooth University. Between 2012 and 2014 I served as Associate Director of the Centre for War Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
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Greta Jones
Greta Jones is emeritus professor of history at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown. She is a graduate of University College London and the London School of Economics. In 1980 she published on Social Darwinism and English Thought and subsequently went on to publish on eugenics and on the politics of science in the Cold War era. During her time in Ireland she has developed an interest in Irish scientific history. and in Irish history of medicine. Supported by the Wellcome Trust she has researched and published on the history of TB in Ireland and migrants from Irish medical schools. She started as her career as a research fellow at the University of Leicester looking at the popularisation of science in the media. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania marking the centenary of Darwin’s death, the London School of Economics and Corpus Christi College Cambridge.
Dr Seán Lucey
Dr Seán Lucey is the Research Manager in the College of Business and Law. He is responsible for supporting the management and development of research activity across the College, especially in the Cork University Business School and School of Law. He has an extensive academic background in medical humanities and history and has held teaching and research positions in the University of Liverpool, Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Oxford Brookes University. Much of this work has been in multi-disciplinary contexts in history departments, medical schools, and public health units. Dr Lucey also has a track record of successfully competing for research funding and has received grants from Irish and British funding agencies including the Irish Research Council, Royal Irish Academy, British Academy and the Northern Ireland Executive. He has also worked on wider research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), Economics and Social Research Council (UK), and Wellcome Trust. Dr Lucey has also published numerous monographs, essay collections, and journal articles with leading international publishers. He has a teaching and research background in the history of public health, comparative and regional health systems, health inequalities and residential/institutional welfare and care. His work has a wide geographical scope and concentrates on developments in Ireland — both north and south — and Great Britain. In 2015 Manchester University Press published his second monograph which explored welfare and healthcare reform in inter-war Ireland. Also in 2015, Dr Lucey co-edited a collection of essays which explores healthcare in comparative and regional settings in Britain and Ireland from 1850 — this was published by the Institute of Historical Research, London. He is currently writing a new monograph which examines public health in twentieth-century Northern Ireland and Belfast which is under contract with Manchester University Press. Previously, he was a Research Fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Poverty and Public Health in Belfast and the North of Ireland’ and also held an Irish Research Council Fellowship (two years) in the Centre for Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College Dublin. The project explored attempts during the 1920s and 1930s of the newly established Irish Free State at reform of the poor law and workhouse system. He also worked as an Economic and Social Research Council (E.S.R.C) Postdoctoral Associate on the ‘Irish welfare regimes under the Irish Poor Law, 1850-1921’ at Oxford Brookes University. This project explored the workhouse and outdoor relief system in Ireland. Other previous research positions were held in the Centre for the History of Medicine, University College Dublin and the Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Dublin. He was also an adjunct lecturer in medical humanities in the Trinity College Dublin’s School of Medicine.
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Thomas J.J. McCloughlin
Thomas J.J. McCloughlin has a wide range of interests in the history of science including Darwin’s botanical research, Byzantine science, museology and informal science, and the relationship between the history of science and history of science education. He is lecturer in science education in St. Patrick’s College (DCU) and he is in charge of the science education unit’s archive which holds the equipment conserved since the college inception in 1875.
Neasa McGarrigle
Neasa McGarrigle is a doctoral student in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin. Her PhD focuses on Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger and the establishment of Éamon de Valera’s Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1940-50. Neasa’s research areas are twentieth-century scientific networks, World War II scientific refugees, science in twentieth-century Ireland and the role of science in national identity. Neasa earned a M.Sc. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Oxford in 2011. She is the Science Editor for the award-winning blog Headstuff and has previously worked on digitalisation, conservation, and cataloguing projects for the Edward Worth Library, the Early Printed Books Collection at Trinity College Dublin and the State Art Collection.
Ian Miller
Ian completed his PhD at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, in 2009. He has since taught medical and Irish history at University College Dublin (2009-10) and held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (UCD, 2010-13) and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship (UU, 2013-16). Ian is the author of various peer-reviewed journal articles, policy pieces and book reviews. In 2011, he published A ModernHistory of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950 with Pickering and Chatto. A second monograph, Reforming Food in Post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, Science and Improvement, 1845-1922, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. He is also the author of Water: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2015) and co-editor (with David Durnin) of Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45 (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Ida Milne
Ida Milne’s primary research interest is in the social history of infectious disease. She holds an Irish Research Council Elevate Fellowship, co-funded by Marie Curie Actions, at Queen’s University Belfast and Maynooth University, for a research project on ‘Changing the landscape of childhood disease in Ireland, 1910-1990.’ This work will look at how new medical treatments, vaccination and public health education campaigns, improved housing, sanitation, diet and environment reduced the childhood mortality from infectious diseases. She was awarded a PhD from TCD in 2011 for her work on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Ireland; in this, as in her other work, she used oral histories to gain insights not available from other sources. A former journalist, she is a director and member of the steering committee of the Oral History Network of Ireland, and a committee member of the Federation of Local History Societies. She has served as the networks Chair between 2022 and 2025.
Nigel Monaghan
Nigel Monaghan is Keeper of the Natural History Division of the National Museum of Ireland. His interests lie in the history of the natural sciences in Ireland, particularly geology, zoology and the development of Irish museums.
Susan Mullaney
Although still practising medicine, Susan completed a Masters in the History of Medicine in the Wellcome Centre in University College London in 2008. Her thesis for the PhD degree in University College Cork was entitled ‘The Evolution of the Medical Professions in Eighteenth Century Ireland’. She currently teaches a history of science module ‘The Scientific Revolution’ as part of the liberal arts program on the American College, Dublin, and contributes to the teaching of medical humanities in the medical school in Trinity College, Dublin. She is the secretary of the History of Medical Section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, and is a member of the Library and Archives Committee of the RDS. She has contributed articles on the Irish Poor Law, the regulation of the eighteenth century apothecaries and the establishment of the nationwide system of infirmaries in eighteenth century Ireland.
Dr Dan O’Brien
Dan O’Brien is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. His research focuses on the undertaking trade and their products in eighteenth century England. This has included a detailed analysis of the early trade in the west of England, with a specific focus on the prosperous settlements of Bath, Bristol and Salisbury. His research also seeks to understand how the undertakers and their goods were perceived by society, by analysing how death and dying were presented in the popular culture of the period. Of particular interest are the ways in which the early undertakers were interpreted as both allies and enemies of the medical professions by people trying to make sense new influences on the experience of death and bereavement. Dan shares his research and other mortality related history on his twitter account @drdan_o
Don O’Leary
Dr Don O’Leary is a historian and scientist. He worked in University College Cork from 1978 to 2017, providing technical support for scientific research, mainly in neuroscience. In parallel with this he studied history and was awarded a B.A. (1990) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the National University of Ireland. Most of his research is focused on the complex relationship between Catholicism and science, both internationally and in relation to Ireland. He is the author of Vocationalism and Social Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2000), Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History (Continuum/ Bloomsbury, 2006), Irish Catholicism and Science: From ‘Godless Colleges’ to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ (Cork University Press, 2012); and Biomedical Controversies in Catholic Ireland (Eryn Press, 2020).
Tanya O’Sullivan
Tanya O’Sullivan is an independent researcher based in Northern Ireland. She holds a BA (Archaeology and Art History) and an MA (Archaeology), from University College Dublin. Her MA research involved an avi-faunal analysis of Viking-age bird bone samples from excavations in Dublin city. She was employed by archaeological consultancies in Scotland before working as a freelance archaeozoologist in Northern Ireland. Currently her research interests revolve around the histories and geographies of science. In 2014 she completed a PhD at the School of Geography, Queen’s University Belfast. Her publications include Geographies of City Science: Urban lives and Origin Debates in Late Victorian Dublin (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019)
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Aisling Shalvey
Aisling Shalvey completed her undergraduate study in English and history in Maynooth University, completing an erasmus year at the University of Vienna. This led her to study a masters at Oxford Brookes in the history of medicine. Her masters thesis focused on eugenics and biopolitics in the Irish Free State. She has also worked on projects and papers relating to infanticide, abortion, medical research and medical ethics. Aisling is a PhD candidate at the University of Strasbourg and works as part of a historical commission to investigate the medical faculty in Strasbourg during German occupation in the Second World War. Her thesis focuses more specifically on the treatment of paediatric patients during the Nazi regime in Strasbourg. Her research is funded by the University of Strasbourg and the Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah.
Caroline Sumpter
Caroline Sumpter is a Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She has research interests in evolutionary science, mental science and folklore in the nineteenth century, and in the press and the history of reading. Her monograph The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale explored political appropriations of folklore and anthropology by neglected readerships, including socialist and child readers. She has published on relationships 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. She is completing a book on evolution, ethics and journalism in the 1890s.
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Morgan Wait
Dr. Morgan Wait recently completed a thesis entitled ‘“Where is she?”: Women and Irish Television 1958-73’ in Trinity College, Dublin. During their time there they held a Cluff Memorial Studentship and was an Early Career Research Fellow in the Long Room Hub. They have published an article in Alphaville Journal entitled ‘Writing the History of Women’s Programming at Telifís Éireann: A Case Study of Home for Tea’. They have also published a number of non-peer reviewed articles in outlets such as RTÉ Brainstorm and Critical Studies in Television online. They also hold an M.Phil in Modern Irish History from Trinity and a BA in History from Salisbury University.
Triona Waters
Triona Waters is a PhD researcher and Departmental Assistant at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Her doctoral research, funded by MIC, investigates the archives of St. Joseph’s Psychiatric Hospital, formerly known as the Limerick District Lunatic Asylum, under the supervision of Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley (NUIG), Dr Úna Ní Broiméil (MIC) and Dr Maura Cronin (MIC). Her PhD research primarily focuses on nineteenth century Irish asylumdom. She was recently awarded the Royal College of Physician’s ‘Kirkpatrick History of Medicine’ research award, 2018 for her work on the history of mental health services in Limerick that considered not only the records of the Limerick asylum, but also the Mental Health Commissioner Reports of 2017. Her MA, awarded by the University of Limerick, examined the social history of St. Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital, formerly known as the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum with a focus on its twentieth century history by using oral history methodology. With a year of study based in Syracuse, New York, she was also awarded ‘Student of the Year’. As post-graduate representative of the Irish History Students’ Association (IHSA), she is a member of the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS), Irish Modern Urban History (IMUH), Irish Medical Humanities Network (IMHN) and History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (HSTM). She is currently guest editor of the University of Limerick Journal, History Studies, 2019.
Rebecca Watterson
Rebecca Watterson is currently pursuing a PhD in history at Ulster University. Her research focuses on psychosurgery in the UK between the years 1940-1986. She holds a BA in history from The Open University and an MA in history from Ulster University. Her MA research examined why the enzyme, cholinesterase, was a major focus of psychiatric medical research in the UK during the 1950s. For this work she was awarded ‘The Birley Prize for the best MA thesis in social history 2020’. She is also the book review editor assistant for the journal, Social History of Medicine.
Nicola Williams
My research follows the work of Irene Manton –– the University of Leeds first female professor –– in her quest to discover new structures inside the cell. The title of my PhD thesis is: ‘Building Plant Cell Biology: Irene Manton and Leeds Botany in the Age of the Electron Microscope’ . Publications: Williams, Nicola (2018) ‘Irene Manton, FRS (1904–1988)’, In: Leeds: Cradle of Innovation, edited by Rachel Unsworth, Leeds Sustainable Development Group, pp. 202-3 (ISBN: 978-0-9539745-4-2);Williams, Nicola (2018) ‘Irene Manton and Problems of Cytology and Evolution in the Pteridophyta’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (under review); Williams, Nicola (2018) ‘The Revolutionary Electron Microscope? Biologists and Physicists in 1950s Electron Microscopy and Plant Cell Architecture’ (in preparation);Williams, Nicola (2016) ‘Irene Manton, Erwin Schrödinger and the Puzzle of Chromosome Structure’ Journal of the History of Biology, 49, (3), pp. 425-459. Link: https://rdcu.be/6ht; Williams, Nicola (2016) ‘Irene Manton: A Leeds Biologist Who Made Her Mark’ February 2016, North Leeds Life.
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