I am a Junior Research Fellow working on the Northern Ireland Peace Process at Pembroke College, Oxford, as part of the Quill Project’s Writing Peace initiative. My academic background lies at the intersection of contemporary history, international politics, and peacebuilding, with a particular focus on Northern Ireland and the role of the United States in sustaining post-conflict peace.

I completed my PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, where my research examined how the internal dynamics of the United States Department of State shaped American intervention in Northern Ireland between 2001 and 2007. Supervised by Professor Richard English, this work formed the basis of my first book, US Diplomacy and the Good Friday Agreement in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland. More broadly, my research explores diplomacy, negotiation, and third-party intervention in divided societies, and how peace agreements are implemented and sometimes strained in the years after conflict formally ends.

Alongside my academic research, I have spent much of my professional life working in education. I am currently Head of History at a secondary school in Northern Ireland, where I have taught for over a decade. This experience has given me a strong appreciation of the challenges teachers face when addressing contested histories in the classroom, particularly those connected to the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process.

My path to Pembroke College and the Quill Project grew naturally out of these overlapping interests. In 2024, I worked as a consultant on the Writing Peace initiative, using some of the archival material on the Northern Ireland peace talks to develop and trial lesson resources for secondary school students. The project’s distinctive approach — using primary sources to clarify how peace is negotiated, written, and contested — closely aligns with both my academic work and experience as a teacher. Becoming a Junior Research Fellow allows me to bring these strands together: contributing to research on the peace process, while also helping to ensure that this research reaches teachers and students across Ireland and the UK.

In my role, I am particularly interested in exploring how international actors, especially the United States, influenced the peace process, and how those dynamics can be communicated effectively to non-specialist audiences. I am also keen to support the Writing Peace project through engagement with teachers and archivists, school visits, and academic and public-facing events. More broadly, I see this fellowship as an opportunity to contribute to informed, balanced, and evidence-based discussions about peace and political compromise. These are issues that remain as relevant today as they were over thirty-years ago during the Irish peace process negotiations.