TRISS Visiting Scholars
The TRiSS Visiting Scholar programme allows leading international researchers to spend periods of time at TRiSS ranging from one week to one year. This programme expands the research capability of TRiSS and encourages the development of collaborative projects between local and external researchers. The visitor programme is intended to help build the research capacity of TRiSS and its associated Schools by promoting interaction between visitors and TRiSS researchers. This is done by the presentation of work in seminars, collaborating with TRiSS researchers, being available to talk to TRiSS postgraduate students, participating in conferences & seminars as well as other informal activities.
Visiting Scholars 2025 - 2026
Michael McGann
Michael McGann's research focuses on welfare governance and the street-level delivery of active labour market programs. He has undertaken research in a range of jurisdictions, including Australia, the UK and Ireland using a variety of methods (ethnography, surveys of frontline employment services staff, and in-depth interviews with jobseekers, street-level workers, and policy officials).
From 2020 - 2022, Michael led the EU Horizon 2020 project, Governing Activation in Ireland. The project was the first empirical study of the marketisation of employment services in Ireland. He is also an investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project (2020-24) The New Digital Governance of Welfare to Work, which is tracking Australia's move to an online employment services system and its implications for welfare governance and jobseekers experiences of welfare and unemployment.
Prior to rejoining Melbourne, Michael was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Social Sciences Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne (2012-2019) and a researcher for the Parliament of Victoria's Family and Community Development Committee and the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Research and Policy Centre.
In addition to his main interests in welfare governance and street-level bureaucracy, Michael also has an interest in participatory forms of policymaking such as co-production and design thinking approaches in public policy.
Jay Wiggan
Jay Wiggan is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. His research concentrates on labour market policy and the governance of public employment services and social security administration. In this field, he has recently published a book that examines the politics and development of social security and employment services in the UK since the 1970s, and related work includes analysis of the politics of job retention schemes in the UK in the 2020s and 1980s.
More broadly, Jay has an interest in the analysis of discourse and how attention to political and policy discourse can help us to better understand the nature of social welfare reform and the policy process. Recent work in this field includes examination of social security policy reform discourse in Brazil, and exploration of socio-technical imaginaries in the construction of benefit reform policy in the UK.
Prior to moving to Edinburgh, Jay held a lectureship in social policy at Queen’s University, Belfast and has held research positions at the University of Manchester and the University of Nottingham.
Visiting Scholars 2024 - 2025
Joanna Podgórska-Rykała
Joanna Podgórska-Rykała works at the University of the Commission of National Education in Krakow as coordinator of the research and analysis department at the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy. She is a graduate of law, political science, and administration and holds a Doctor of Social Sciences from the University of Silesia in Katowice, habilitated in Political Science and Administration from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.
Joanna was awarded the Scholarship of the Polish Minister of Science for Outstanding Young Scientists, four years running. She is a specialist in the field of participation with more than 15 years of teaching experience at universities. Her research work is mostly focused on citizen participation, she specializes particularly in democratic innovation.
She is the author of over 130 publications, including single-author monographs in internationally recognized publishing houses such as "Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government" (2024, Routledge) or "Deliberative Innovation According to the Decision-Makers: A Clash between Perceptions and Reality" (2025, Brill Publishers). She belongs to many professional societies including the Political Studies Association of Ireland (Specialist Group on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy), the European Consortium for Political Studies (ECPR Standing Group on Democratic Innovation), and the Polish Association for European Studies (Chairperson of the Section Participation and Democratic Innovation). She has years of experience in project management and NGO leadership. Joanna was involved in the local community for 16 years, first as Chair of the Youth City Council (2003-2006) and then as a City Councillor (2006-2010 & 2014-2018).
Visiting Scholars 2022 - 2023
Cormac O'Dea
Cormac O’Dea is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US and the Economic and Social Research Institute. He studied economics as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin and did a PhD in economics in University College London. Prior to joining Yale he worked as an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, a research institute focused on microeconomic policy. Much of his work there focused on issues related to household preparation for retirement and also included work on comparing the incentives to work in Ireland and the UK generated by the respective tax and benefits systems.
His ongoing papers include work on who benefits the most from retirement saving incentives and a study of the extent to which spouses co-operate with each other in making their long-term retirement savings decisions.
Contact: cormac.odea@yale.edu
John Lynham
John Lynham obtained his BA in Economics from Trinity before completing an MA in Marine Biology and PhD in Economics at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is currently a Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research interests lie at the intersection of marine science and environmental economics. He recently published a paper in Science on the spillover benefits from Large Marine Protected Areas: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63291104.
He is spending his sabbatical leave back home in Ireland and is exploring questions related to the creation of new protected areas in Irish waters.
Contact: lynham@hawaii.edu
Sören Carlson
Sören Carlson is a research associate at the Department of Sociology at Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany. Before that, he obtained his doctorate in sociology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and worked at Freie Universität Berlin. In his research, he is particularly interested in transnational mobility, social class and education and how these are affected by transnationalization processes, especially within the European context.
Sören joins the Department of Sociology of Trinity College Dublin as a visiting research fellow from September 2022 to March 2023.
Contact: soeren.carlson@uni-flensburg.de
Visiting Scholars 2021 - 2022
Stephan Köppe
Stephan Köppe is Assistant Professor at University College Dublin and fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy. His research is investigating the nexus of public and private welfare. This includes both the political economy of welfare market creation and analyses of inequalities resulting of these reforms. At the core his research is comparative and covers Ireland, Germany, Sweden, the UK and United States. This includes policy studies on private pension, private schools, provision of long-term care or housing wealth. More recently, his research also included labour market reforms, leave policies and nonprofit organisations. During the fellowship, Stephan pursues four main projects: - Fair Deal: long-term care policy reforms and inequalities in Ireland - Inheritance conflicts in Sweden and Ireland - Paternity benefit take-up - Advocacy of nonprofits Moreover, Stephan organises the event series ScandIRE – Ireland and Nordic Welfare in Spring 2022 (www.scandire.eventbrite.com).
Florent Brayard
Florent Brayard, a historian, is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and member of the Centre de recherches historiques in Paris (EHESS). He is a specialist in the policy of the persecution and extermination of Jews, on which he published several books, particularly La “solution finale de la question juive”: La technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision (Paris, Fayard, 2004) and Auschwitz, enquête sur un complot nazi (Paris, Seuil, 2012). With Andreas Wirsching, he recently published the first French critical edition of Mein Kampf, Historiciser le mal: Une édition critique de Mein Kampf (Paris, Fayard, 2021).
Previous Visiting Scholars