Personal statement

I am chancellor’s fellow in the history of activism at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this I worked as a research fellow on a major AHRC-funded project about migration from the north of Ireland during the Troubles at the University of Brighton, and as a lecturer at the University of Brighton. My first book, Belfast punk and the Troubles: An oral history was published with Manchester University Press in 2022. This is an oral history of the Belfast punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, analysing its relationship to the political, cultural and social context from which it emerged – particularly in terms of the war in the North - as well as considering how an affiliation with the scene affected and continues to affect the subjectivity and identity of my interviewees.

At the moment I am working on a new project on history, temporality and the Troubles, which will result in a short open-access book with Cambridge University Press to be published in 2026. This is part of a wider research interest in the field of historical representations of the Troubles.

I am also finishing a co-written book with the Brighton Memory Studies Collective, also to be published in 2026, on temporality and violence.

More broadly I’m interested in the ways in which interpretative oral history and memory studies can illuminate people’s affective and discursive relations to politics, place and culture, in public or community history and in cultural and social history.

I sit on the editorial board of the Oral History Journal; I’m also the co-director of the Scottish Oral History Centre, co-lead of the Communities, Societies, States research group at Strathclyde, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and on the board of the Memory, Narrative, Histories Research Group. I recently edited a special issue of the OHJ, published in March 2023, on personal narratives and the Troubles, and along with some colleagues have organised the annual Oral History Society conference held at Strathclyde in June 2025.