Educated at Trinity College, Dublin (B.A. History & English and PhD in modern Irish history) and Nottingham University (M.A. American Studies), I taught at LSU College, Southampton, Aberdeen University and University College Cork before my appointment as Professor of Gender Studies at GCU in 2012. My principal research interests lie in gender and medical histories, and in the nineteenth century history of Irish psychiatry in particular. I have published on a range of areas in modern Irish history, including Protestant women’s social, political and cultural experiences, the development of the asylum system in the west of Ireland, and twentieth century obstetrics.
I am currently finalising a report on symphysiotomy for the Department of Health (Ireland), and a monograph on the Irish asylum system in the nineteenth-century west of Ireland.
I am at the early stages of two distinct research projects: the first relates to health and illness amongst Irish sailors in the Royal Navy, and the second is a study of possible epigenetic change as a result of the Great Famine.
