Dr Caoimhe Whelan

Dr Caoimhe Whelan is a Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin. Her research explores the history, heritage, literature and culture of Ireland, and she is currently researching the Arts and Humanities interface with policy at the Trinity Long Room Hub. She has held a number of research fellowships, including postdoctoral and postgraduate fellowships from the Irish Research Council, and most recently, a research fellowship from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at the Trinity Long Room Hub exploring the history of Ireland in a global context, the diaspora and public history. She is the Honorary Secretary of the Friends of Medieval Dublin.

Dr Sparky Booker

Sparky Booker is a lecturer in Medieval Irish History at Queen's University Belfast. Her research looks at the social, cultural and legal history of late medieval Ireland, with a particular focus on the English colony in Ireland. Her work has examined the experiences of women, the Irish, and other legally disadvantaged groups in the colony. Other research interests include marriage, sumptuary law, the Irish church and the Irish in Rome in the later middle ages. Some of this research has been published in books and journals including Irish Historical Studies and Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as in a monograph in Cambridge University's Press' 'Studies in Medieval Life and Thought' series and entitled Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland: The English and Irish of the Four Obedient Shires (2018). This monograph was awarded the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books and the James S Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences by the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). Sparky has been a member of the Friends of Medieval Dublin since 2009 and co-founded the Tales of Medieval Dublin lecture series and co-edited the resulting volume Tales of Medieval Dublin.

Maeve O’Rourke

Maeve O’Rourke is Lecturer in Human Rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights (ICHR). She is Programme Director of the BCL Law and Human Rights, a newly established undergraduate degree programme at NUI Galway. She is also Director of the LLM Human Rights Law Clinic at the ICHR. Since 2010 Maeve has provided pro bono assistance to ‘Justice for Magdalenes’ and she is currently a member of the research group ‘Justice for Magdalenes Research'. She is co-director of the evidence-gathering initiative with Hogan Lovells LLP, ‘Clann: Ireland’s Unmarried Mothers and their Children: Gathering the Data’. Maeve is a barrister at 33 Bedford Row, London, and she is a registered Attorney at Law in New York. Twitter: @maeveorourke

Katherine O'Donnell

Katherine O'Donnell is an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin where, among other subjects, she teaches Feminism and Gender Justice. Katherine was a co-founding member of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Archive: the IQA, now safely deposited as a living archive with the National Library of Ireland and she currently works with Justice for Magdalenes Research, collecting oral histories of witnesses from the Magdalene Laundries. Twitter: @Ka_ODonnell

Claire McGettrick

Claire McGettrick is an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar at the School of Sociology in University College Dublin. Her PhD research is a sociological examination of the bodies of expert knowledge on adoption. It is investigating how and why adopted adults and children have been classified and defined as objects of knowledge and as categories of administration. The study is also examining how adoption activists in the Republic of Ireland have engaged with the bodies of expert knowledge on adoption.

Claire is also an adopted person and survivors' rights advocate. She is co-founder of Justice for Magdalenes Research and Adoption Rights Alliance. She coordinates the Magdalene Names Project, which has recorded the details of over 1,900 women who lived and died behind laundry walls.

Claire also jointly coordinates the Clann Project with Dr Maeve O'Rourke. The Clann Project provides free statement-drafting assistance to witnesses who wish to give evidence to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation in Ireland. Twitter: @cmcgettrick

Dr Alison Waller

Dr Alison Waller is a Reader at the University of Roehampton and a member of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL). Alison teaches on both the on-site and distance learning MA programmes in Children’s Literature at Roehampton, alongside modules on the undergraduate English curriculum. Her publications include Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics (2019) and Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (2009). Alison is currently working on a study of ordinariness in contemporary British Young Adult literature and is running a Covid-19 related project funded by the British Academy, “Reading for Normal”.

Dr Arpita Chakraborty

Dr Arpita Chakraborty is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ireland India Institute, Dublin City University. Her areas of interest are masculinity, political violence, and relations between gender relations and religious practices in contemporary India. She holds a Masters in Media and Cultural Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, during which she co-directed ‘Bharatmata Ki Jai’, a national award winning documentary film. She worked as an Editor in Sage Publications India before undertaking her PhD in ‘Violence, Religion, and Masculinism in Contemporary India’ at DCU.

Mariya Salim

Mariya Salim is a women’s rights activist, researcher, writer and feminist, based in New Delhi, India. She undertook her second Master’s degree in human rights law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London as a Felix scholar. With over ten years of experience in the development sector, she has lent herself to many feminist concerns, especially those related to the rights of Muslim women. Mariya writes extensively in various media outlets including Al Jazeera, on issues related to women's human rights as well as themes of Nationalism, Identity Based Violence and Muslim women’s rights. Her work with women survivors of sexual violence in the Muzaffarnagar riots has made substantial contribution to the narrative around women's access to justice and rights in the context of Communal Polarization.

Zoya Rehman

Zoya Rehman is a feminist researcher and organiser based in Islamabad, Pakistan, where she is working as a Special Projects Manager at Media Matters for Democracy, a Pakistan based not-for-profit geared towards independent journalism and media and digital rights advocacy. She has been working on gender and legal issues from a multidisciplinary approach through her practice and research. Zoya is a recipient of the Chevening Scholarship Award, and holds MA in Gender Studies and Law at SOAS, University of London.

Sahar Ahmed

Sahar Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin. Her research examines and offers a reinterpretation of the right to freedom of religion under International Human Rights Law and Islamic jurisprudence. Sahar is from Lahore, Pakistan, where she worked as a Barrister for many years, being dual qualified at The Honourable Society of Gray's Inn (England & Wales) and as an Advocate of the High Courts of Pakistan. Sahar holds a Masters in Law from SOAS, University of London, where she was an Annemarie Schimmel Scholar. You can find Sahar on Twitter discussing race, feminism, religion, and the law. Twitter: @saharisright

Michael Bellesiles

Michael Bellesilesis the author of numerous books on American history, including 1877, A People’s History of the U.S. Military, and most recently Inventing Equality, on the evolution of the concept of equality in the US, focusing on the post-civil war constitutional amendments. Bellesiles earned a BA from the University of California–Santa Cruz and PhD from the University of California at Irvine; he was a professor of history at Emory University, and taught at UCLA, Stanford, Oxford, and Trinity College in Connecticut, where he lives, writes, and mixes cocktails.
Website: https://www.inventingequality.com/

Jeremy Bierbach

Jeremy Bierbach is an immigration lawyer at the law firm Franssen Advocaten in Amsterdam, and an associate fellow of the Amsterdam Center for European Law and Governance (ACELG) at the University of Amsterdam. He defended his PhD in European constitutional law at the University in Amsterdam in 2015, and a book based on his dissertation, Frontiers of Equality in the Development of US and EU Citizenship, was published in 2017 by Asser Press. His focus of interest, in both his practice and his continuing research, is the citizenship of the European Union, which he sees as an important source of rights in member states of the EU for members of minority groups who are unrepresented or underrepresented in the democratic process of those member states.
Twitter: @basilok

Amy Liu

Amy Liu (PhD. Emory University; BA Smith College) is an associate professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of ethnic politics, language politics, and migration politics. Her first book Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes (2015, University of Pennsylvania) examines how the recognition of lingua francas can be conducive for economic growth – in Asia generally and in Southeast Asia specifically. Her second book The Language of Political Incorporation: Chinese Migrants in Europe (2021, Temple University Press) looks at the linguistic networks of Chinese migrants and the implications for engagement with local authorities in Europe. She is working on a new book project examining the diversity and representation of government cabinets. Starting fall 2021, Amy will assume co-directorship of the Race and Ethnic Politics Lab at the University of Texas.
Twitter: @dramyhliu

Evelyn Tsao

Evelyn Tsao (LLM Harvard; PCLL and BA The University of Hong Kong) is a public interest lawyer in Hong Kong with a main focus on the rights and welfare of women in general, migrant workers, the LGBTQ community, and other vulnerable sectors of the society. She has a particular interest in family and reproductive rights in the context and gay and lesbian relationships, and her firm (Patricia Ho & Associates, where she is a Partner) is committed to combatting issues of human trafficking.

Dr. Carrie Sawtell

Dr. Carrie Sawtell completed her BA, MA and PhD in the Archaeology Department at the University of Sheffield. Her PhD was entitled Non-Citizen Commemoration in Fifth and Fourth Century BC Attica, and considered metic (resident foreigners) and slave tombstones, and religious participation, as well as the representation of honours and alliances, combining together to give a picture of the iconographic representation of non-citizens across various spaces in Classical Athens. After her PhD she continued her research as the Macmillan-Rodewald Fellow at the British School at Athens (2019/20), with a focus on funerary commemoration and the use of the word chrestos / chreste (meaning good, useful or worthy) in epitaphs and examining when and where in the Greek world this adjective is used to commemorate slaves. She is currently training as a secondary history teacher.

Dr Katherine Backler

Dr Katherine Backler is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her research centres around women, relationships, and self-writing in ancient Greece. Her doctorate, Women’s Relationships in Classical Attika, analysed how women’s relationships were formed and changed across the course of women’s lives, how they cross-cut other groupings and divisions in Attic society, and how women described them. She has a particular interest in informal family and care relationships, including fostering and shared breastfeeding. She has previously written on how textiles in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey memorialise the labour and identity of women who are excluded from dominant narratives and memorialising processes. Her current project is on the Attic speech-writer Lysias. At the University of Oxford, Katherine teaches ancient Greek history and literature, and a paper on sexuality and gender in the ancient world. She also writes on religion and culture for The Tablet Catholic weekly.

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