Principal Investigator: Professor Peter Shirlow is Principal Investigator on the Director at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies. He was formerly the Deputy Director of the Institute for Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, QUB. He is the Independent Chair of the OFMDFM Employers' Guidance on Recruiting People with Conflict-Related Convictions Working Group and a board member of the mental health charity Threshold. He is a Visiting Research Professor at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He sits on the editorial boards of Irish Political Studies and International Planning Studies. Professor Shirlow has undertaken conflict transformation work in Northern Ireland and has used that knowledge in exchanges with governments, former combatants and NGOs in the former Yugoslavia, Moldova, Bahrain and Iraq, He has has presented talks to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives and is a regular media contributor.
Pauline Hadaway is a Research Administrator, Arts for Reconciliation research team. Pauline has worked in arts and education since 1990 and was director of Belfast Exposed Photography between 2000 and 2013. In her doctoral research at the University of Manchester, Pauline is currently exploring different uses of arts, heritage and culture as tools for peace building and economic and social reconstruction in Northern Ireland. Publications include, ‘Re-imagining Titanic, re-imaging Belfast’ in Relaunching Titanic: memory and marketing in the ‘post -conflict city’, Routledge, 2013 and ‘Escaping the Panopticon’ in Photography Reframed: visions in photographic culture, I.B. Tauris, 2018.
Co-Investigator: Dr Des O’Rawe is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queens University Belfast, where he chiefly lectures on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of film. His recent publications include Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts; and Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (with Mark Phelan). He has published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Studies in Documentary Film, Screen, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Kinema, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Screening the Past. He is currently co-editing the Cinema Aesthetics series, and continues to publish on aspects of Irish film, visual culture, and contemporary literature.
Dr Peter Campbell is a senior lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Liverpool, leading the department’s provision of quantitative research methods training. His wider teaching and research is focussed specifically on the use of methods in the field of cultural policy, and this is the focus of a range of publications including his 2019 monograph ‘Persistent Creativity: Making the case for art, culture and the creative industries’, published by Palgrave. His research in this field has involved projects considering the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Sistema England, and the European Capital of Culture programme.
Dr Victoria Durrer is co-Investigator, Arts for Reconciliation research team and Ad Astra Research Fellow in Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. Her research traverses the areas of arts management and cultural policy practice and stresses their interconnection. She investigates what and how particular individuals, groups and cultural forms are included and / or excluded in the practices and policies of international, national and local cultural institutions, government and quasi-state bodies. Developing research projects with stakeholders is key to her approach. She is co-founder of the Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland and an editor of the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy. Contributor and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy, her most recent publication, Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times is due out in the Palgrave Sociology of the Arts
Co-Investigator: David Grant is a Senior Lecturer in Drama in the School of Creative Arts at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he has worked since 2000. A former Managing Editor of Theatre Ireland magazine, Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, and Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, he continues work as a theatre director alongside his academic work, having recently directed revivals of Owen McCafferty’s Mojo Mickybo for Bedlam Theatre Company, Patrick McCabe’s Frank Pig Says Hello! For An Grianan Theatre, and Oscar Wilde at Home, a site-specific event in Florence Court House in Enniskillen for the Wilde Weekend. He has a long association with youth and community-based arts, most recently devising Days in the Bay with the Tiger’s Bay Men’s Group in Belfast. Publications include Playing the Wild Card for the Community Relations Council, and The Stagecraft of Brian Friel for Greenwich Exchange Books. He was director of the 1st Brian Friel Summer School, which took place in August 2015 in Redcastle, Donegal.
Dr Matt Jennings is Lecturer in Drama at Ulster University. Originally from Sydney, Matt has worked as a performer, writer, director and facilitator in Australia, Ireland, UK, Italy, Morocco and France. He has been based in Northern Ireland since 2001, where his experience of working in applied drama and conflict transformation has informed his research, practice and teaching. In 2010, Matt completed a PhD on the impact of community drama in Northern Ireland since 1998. He has also provided professional development for community and health workers and is conducting research in the fields of Arts in Health and Arts Management.
Dr Sarah Jankowitz is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, examining the impact of the arts on peace and reconciliation processes in Northern Ireland. Previously a community practitioner in Belfast’s voluntary sector, her interests revolve around how societies respond to and resolve complex legacies of violent conflict, and in particular issues of victimhood, memory and identity. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2015, holds an MPhil in International Peace Studies, also from Trinity, and a BA in International Studies from American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Sarah is currently working as a Lecturer in Criminology at Queen's University Belfast.
Dr Alex Coupe is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Irish Studies working on ‘The Art of Reconciliation: Do reconciliation-funded arts projects transform conflict?’ a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is a specialist in contemporary theatre and performance, with a particular interest in Northern Ireland. His PhD, undertaken at Goldsmiths, University of London, examined the gender politics of performance after the Good Friday Agreement, uncovering a strand of artistic and theatrical practice that challenged the (neo)liberal peace by emphasising those states of interdependency, forms of solidarity and practices of care denied within patriarchal nationalism and androcentric individualism. Before undertaking his doctoral studies, Alex obtained an MA from Birkbeck, University of London and a BA from the University of Oxford. As an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, he taught courses on modern Irish drama and philosophies of the body, and has been published in Études irlandaises and the Irish Times.
Research Partners
Kabosh: Founded in 1994, Kabosh is committed to challenging the notion of what theatre is and where it takes place. The company aims to reinvent the ways in which stories are told, commissioning new writing and devising work for site-specific environments and installation.
Links
Academic Research Team
- Professor Peter Shirlow
- Dr Victoria Durrer
- Dr Peter Campbell
- David Grant
- Dr Des O’Rawe
- Dr Matt Jennings
- Dr Sarah Jankowitz
Partner Organisations