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Science and Culture

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Leonie Hannan
School Of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Leonie Hannan is a social and cultural historian working on intellectual life in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on themes of gender, material culture and domestic space. She is currently working on a second monograph for Manchester University Press, entitled A Culture of Curiosity: Scientific Enquiry in the Eighteenth-Century Home. Leonie works collaboratively with scholars from other disciplines and through these partnerships is working on projects concerned variously with ageing, cultures of care and practices of material attention. 

Dr Caroline Sumpter
Caroline Sumpter
School of Arts, English and Languages

Caroline Sumpter has research interests in evolutionary, psychological and anthropological approaches to literature in the nineteenth century. She has published articles on the relationship between morality and evolution in the work of Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Richard Jefferies, on William Morris and anthropology, and on Andrew Lang and psycho-folklore. Her monograph The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale included an exploration of the ways teenaged girls, working-class children and gay and socialist readers engaged with the ‘science’ of folklore (including debates over evolution). She has written extensively on the relationship between periodicals and science in the nineteenth century, and is completing a book on evolution, ethics and journalism in the 1890s.

Diarmid Finnegan
Diarmid Finnegan
School of Natural and Built Environment

Diarmid's research interests include the cultural history and geographies of the life and earth sciences, with a particular emphasis on religious engagements with scientific developments during the long nineteenth century. His recent work has centred on public speech as a situated mode of interaction between science and culture in the nineteenth century. Diarmid has just completed a project investigating debates about evolution and theology in the early twentieth century. This was part of a larger John Templeton Foundation-funded project on conjunctive explanations in science and religion. His current research is concerned with the historical geography of modern ideas about what it means to be human. 

Diarmid's earliest work examined the reception of glacial theory in Victorian Edinburgh, investigated the historical geographies of Scottish natural history societies in the period 1831-1900 and, with Charles Withers and Rebekah Higgitt, explored the role of geography in the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014, Diarmid completed a two-year AHRC-funded project on science in nineteenth-century Belfast. He has also written about the geologist James Croll and the reception of ideas about human evolution in the context of religious debates about the creation of Eve (rather than Adam).

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Satish Kumar Bookcase
M. Satish Kumar
The Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice

Dr M. Satish Kumar, FRGS, RCS, FHEA was the former Director of Queen’s Academy India and Director for Internationalisation at the School of Natural and Built Environment. He is a Fellow at the The Senator George J Mitchell Institute at Queen’s University Belfast. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Member of the Royal Commonwealth Society. He is a leading international expert on colonial and postcolonial studies focused on South Asia, covering many areas across social sciences and humanities. His knowledge and expertise are widely sought by Governments, charities, and other national and international organisations. He is also extensively involved in the academic community as a Member of the UK Peer Review Colleges for AHRC-GCRF and Newton Fund, Carnegie Funds, STRIDE and SPARC (India). He held Visiting Professorships in Banaras Hindu University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, and was recently nominated to the COP26 UKRI AHRC Panel, 2021. 

Key seminal publications are:

Books:

2021 Colonial Space and Missionary Endeavours in British Northeast India (eds) Sajal Nag and M. Satish Kumar (in Press).

2007 Globalisation and Northeast India: Some Developmental Issues (eds.) A. Dubey, M. Satish Kumar, N.  Srivastava, and Eugene Thomas (Standard Press, New Delhi).

2006 Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies of India, (eds.) Saraswati Raju, M. Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge. New Delhi: Sage.

 Chapters

2021 “Tackling Challenges of COVID19: An Assessment of the Convergence-Divergence debates from the Global South-India”, in Stanley Brunn eds. COVID-19 and an Emerging World of Ad Hoc Geographies. Springer, USA (jointly with Aditya Singh, in Press).

2021 “Challenges and Opportunities towards Management of Solid Wastes in Indian Cities: Beyond the Rhetoric of Convenience” in eds. B. Thakur; S. Chattopadhyay; Rajiv R. Thakur and R.K. Abhay, in Resource Management, Sustainable Development and Governance- Festschrift in honour of Bruce Mitchell. Netherlands: Springer, (jointly with Ruchira Ghosh in Press).

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Dr Ashok Malhot
Ashok Malhotra
School Of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Ashok Malhotra is a Senior Lecturer in British Imperial History. Malhotra is the author of Making British Indian Fictions, 1772-1823, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. He has published peer-reviewed articles in journals that specialize in such diverse fields as nineteenth century literature, food studies, South Asia area studies, cultural history, book history and the history of religion. He is currently working on his forthcoming monograph which examines how the early twentieth century Indian Medical Service in British India's nutritional and agricultural research influenced discourses pertaining to nutrition, the environment and race in Britian, colonial India and Northern America. In relation to the Science and Culture Research Group, he has published two articles: 'Cutting Edge Research in the Contact Zone: The Establishment of the Nutritional Laboratories in Coonoor, 1925-27' in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2021) and 'Race, Diet and Class: Robert McCarrison's Laboratory Experiments in Coonoor, 1925-27' in Food Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal (2019).

Head and Shoulders of Prof Livingstone
David Livingstone
School of Natural and Built Environment

David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of several books including The Geographical Tradition, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, Putting Science in its Place, Adam’s Ancestors, and Dealing with Darwin. He is currently working on a history of ideas about climate and culture, to be published by Princeton University Press, entitled The Empire of Climate. He was awarded an OBE in 2002 and a CBE in 2019, and has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. 

Ian Campbell Historian
Ian Campbell
School Of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Dr Ian Campbell is senior lecturer in early modern Irish History. He has published in the fields of the history of political thought and the history of race, and he is interested in early modern universities as sites of scientific and cultural transmission. His current research has been funded by the European Research Council (https://war-and-supernature.com/), and has appeared in Irish Historical Studies, Archivium Hibernicum, the Historical Journal, the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Cambridge History of Ireland. His book Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race: The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 2013), analyses the relationship between the early modern sciences of medicine and theology to heredity and ethnicity. He is currently writing a history of Franciscan political thought in early modern Rome, that identifies the Jewish family as a vital locus for European political thought.

Head and Shoulders of Gemma Carney
Gemma Carney
School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work

Dr. Gemma Carney is a social gerontologist and senior lecturer in social policy at Queen’s University Belfast. Gemma has been researching the science and culture of ageing since her first job as Policy Analyst at the Irish Senior Citizen’s Parliament in 2007. Since then she has been working on or leading a range of inter-disciplinary projects on ageing, often with artists, writers or humanities scholars such as Leonie Hannan (see The Lively Project). Gemma is active in British gerontology serving on various committees which promote the study of ageing including the editorial board of Ageing & Society. Her book Critical Questions for Ageing Societies (with Paul Nash, University of Southern California) offers a thought-provoking introduction to longevity and was nominated for the Richard Kalish award (Gerontological Society of America) in 2021. She is currently Co-Investigator on the Dementia in the Minds of Characters and Readers project.

Karen Rann
School of Natural and Built Environment

As a visual artist, Karen Rann's work is place specific. Her 'Artist in Residence' positions have included work with the National Trust for Scotland (2013-2014), Creative Scotland's 'Year of Natural Scotland', Gairloch Heritage Museum (2011 and 2013) and Kulturtage Oldenburg in Germany. Her research into the history of contour lines on maps has resulted in a collaboration with the John Muir Trust on The Great Lines Project (2014-2016), funded by the Art Council England and the Lines of Attraction Project (2018) a Creative Scotland funded project (2018). An abiding interest in contour lines took an academic turn in 2018, research now encompasses cartography, geography, and histories of ‘space and place’. Rann is currently a PhD student in the Geography Department at Queen’s, the draft title for her thesis is The Art of Contouring: Towards a Creative Historical Geography of Contour Lines in Britain and Ireland, 1778–1860. 

For further information: www.karenrann.co.uk 

Publications: 

Rann, Karen. “The Appearance of Contour Lines on British and Irish Maps, 1778–1870.” Imago Mundi 72:2, (2020): 220-221. 

Rann, Karen and Robin S. Johnston. “Chasing the line: Hutton’s contribution to the invention of contours.” Journal of Maps (March 2019): 48–56.  

Rann, Karen. The Great Lines Project: an exploration of the history of contour lines. Newcastle: self-         published, 2016. ISBN 978-0-9933496-2-1. 

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Hiroki Shin
Hiroki Shin
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Hiroki Shin is a historian of energy, transport and the environment from the nineteenth century to the present. Dr Shin’s research has explored past energy transitions by considering both hard factors (energy markets, resource politics, infrastructure) and soft factors (consumer culture, social acceptance, everyday practices) with an eye toward mobilising historical research to inform public discussions and actions on today’s global challenges, particularly climate change. His research interests include the diffusion of energy technology, the social impacts of energy disruption, variations in energy transition paths and energy consumer movements. Dr Shin has also been involved in science communication and public history as a means of intervening in contemporary energy policy and practice  – his recent publication includes Energy Communication Toolkit. In his ongoing project, Dr Shin works with cultural sectors from museums to artist groups to envisage proactive roles that cultural institutions can play in global society’s adaptation to climate change.

Dr Jane Lugea
Jane Lugea
School of Arts, English and Languages

Dr Jane Lugea specialises in Stylistics: that is, linguistic analysis of literary and creative language. Her research draws on the Cognitive Sciences and empirical methods of data collection and analysis to explore the relationship between textual features and rhetorical effects. As PI on an AHRC-funded research project, ‘Dementia in the minds of characters and readers’, Jane has investigated a) how dementia is represented in the minds of fictional characters, and b) how the literary representations effect real readers. As such, the project explored the potential of literary language to facilitate awareness and empathy towards lived experiences of the condition. In these ways, Jane’s research involves the Medical Humanities and empirical approaches to literature and reading. She is co-author of the textbook Stylistics: Text, Cognition, Corpora (Lugea and Walker, forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan).

Oliver Dunnett
School of Natural Built Environment

Oliver Dunnett is a senior lecturer in human geography at Queen’s University Belfast, specialising in cultural, historical and political geography. His research focuses on the ways in which the cultures and politics of outer space, science and technology are connected to questions of place, landscape and identity in a variety of local, regional and national contexts. He has explored these ideas through topics such as the moral geographies of light pollution, the ethics of space exploration, and the history of outer space in geography. 

Dunnett's research monograph Earth, Cosmos and Culture: Geographies of Outer Space in Britain, 1900-2020 examines cultures of outer space in Britain, from their science-fictional foundations to the geopolitics of the British space programme and engagements with the cosmic sublime in art, folk culture and broadcasting. He has further research interests in literary geographies, critical geopolitics and the geographies of popular culture. 

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Keith Lilley
Keith Lilley
School of Nature and Built Environment

Prof Keith Lilley is a geographer with particular research interests in the connections between maps and landscapes.

Recently, Lilley has focused on 'the field' as a site of cartographic production (and consumption) and the survey practices which not only created maps in the past but also shaped local landscapes. This involves adopting methods encompassing fieldwork and archival study. Current funded research exploring this theme include an AHRC-IRC project, "OS200", with the University of Limerick and Royal Irish Academy on the Ordnance Survey in Ireland (go.qub.ac.uk/IrelandMapped) and a recent project called "Surveying Empires" in collaboration with the University of Calcutta, funded by the British Academy (surveyingempires.org).

Hannah Campbell profile picture
Hannah Campbell
School Of Natural and Built Environment

Hannah is a PhD student specialising in historical geography, specifically early modern constructions of ocean space. Her current research focuses on how cartographic sources constructed the Indian Ocean space, exploring how these representations were influenced by the circuits of knowledge across this space.

Julie Mathias
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Julie Mathias is a PhD candidate specialising in the social-cultural history of medical legislation in the modern period. Her research adopts an intersectional approach to explore how the 1832 Anatomy Act affected first and second-generation Irish migrants in London during the nineteenth century.

Chelsea Gilmore
Chelsea Gilmore
School Of Arts, English and Languages

Chelsea Gilmore is a PhD candidate from AEL researching representations of disability in the works of feminist eugenicist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her areas of interest include critical disability theory, feminist disability theory, American eugenic writing, first-wave feminist writing, speculative fiction and Gilman studies. Her PhD project involves a re-engagement with historical material from the American eugenics movement where it influenced and intersected with Gilman's Forerunner. This body of literature makes continuous references to national fitness, deficiency, and a dehumanising biologized rhetoric that evokes the categories of disability as a contaminant to society. It is important to be mindful of this context when using the terms associated with disability and this linguistic complexity underlines a need for further progress in this area.

Sarah Baccianti
Sarah Baccianti
External Affiliate

Dr. Sarah Baccianti is the Research Manager at National Museums NI. In her role she manages the implementation and development of National Museums NI’s Research Policy and Research Plan and reviews and monitors all research and academic partnerships. Before moving to the museum/heritage sector, Sarah lectured in Old English and Old Norse literature at the University of Oxford, Université de Lausanne, University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Oxford where she researched the narrative structure of chronicles and historiae written in Old Norse, Old English, and Anglo-Latin. Her latest project – which was funded by the British Academy, and that she continues to research in her spare time – focuses on the reception and transmission of scientific and medical knowledge in medieval Denmark and Iceland.

Lucy Wood
School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Lucy is a PhD student in history whose main interests are gender, domestic technology and energy histories. Her present research focuses on the role of women in the home as both domestic consumers and innovators at a pivotal time of energy transition. Incorporating a multidisciplinary approach, including a focus on material culture, Lucy hopes that a greater understanding of the everyday realities of domestic technologies and energy consumption can ultimately empower us in our present transition towards greener energies and battle against climate change.