About the Team
Ruth Duffy is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. Ruth is a historian of medical and oral history. Her expertise lies in modern British and Irish history: the Troubles, medicine, Irish society and culture. She particularly focuses on using oral history as a method to uncover hidden or sensitive histories. She received her PhD, which focused on the experiences of the health service during the Northern Ireland Troubles, in 2021. Her first monograph, Healthcare and the Troubles: The Conflict Experience of the Northern Ireland Health Service, 1968–1998, based on her PhD research, is being published by Liverpool University Press in September 2024. You can read more about some of her research in this piece for the Conversation, How the Troubles affected healthcare in Northern Ireland. You can follow Ruth on X (twitter) here.
Alison Gardenis a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2018-2020). Prior to this, Alison was a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2015-2016) and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018) at University College Dublin. Her criticism, essays, reviews and interviews have been published in Textual Practice, Contemporary Women's Writing, Aeon, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, TIME, RTÉ and elsewhere. She recently produced a series of short programmes for the BBC exploring four novels of love and danger written during the Northern Ireland conflict. Her first book, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, was published by Liverpool University Press in June 2020. You can follow Alison on X (Twitter) here.
Diane Urquhart is Professor of Gender History in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics (HAPP) of Queen's University Belfast and President of the Women's History Association of Ireland (WHAI). The former chair of modern history in the Institute of Irish Studies of the University of Liverpool, Diane is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published extensively on Irish women's history, gender and politics including the prize-winning Irish Divorce: A history (2020), The Ladies of Londonderry: women and political patronage (2008), Women in Ulster Politics, 1890-1940 (2000), five edited/co-edited international collections as well as the co-authored Irish Abortion Journey, 1920-2018 with Lindsey Earner-Byrne (2019). Diane is currently working on the first full-length history of the criminal conversation legal suit.