I am a gender historian with a special interest in modern Ireland and Britain. I specialise in political and legal history particularly women’s first entry into politics from the late-nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-Irish political patronage and Ireland's history of abortion and divorce.  Irish Divorce: A History, the first full-length history of Irish divorce, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This work won the international ACIS J S Donnelly, Sr. prize for the Humanities and the Social Sciences in 2021. Co-authored with Lindsey Earner-Byrne, The Irish Abortion Journey, 1920-2018 was published in the Pivot series by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.  Much of my work therefore engages with and impacts on contemporary debates regarding women’s legal and reproductive rights.

Throughout my career I have sought to foster international collaborations from gender historians and that work had brought together those with a shared interest in the developing field of gender history from Europe, North America and Asia. This work is interdisciplinary, spanning the disciplines of history, politics, law, literature and the visual arts and includes editing/co-editing peer-reviewed collections on Irish women’s history and the impact of conflict on women in 20^th-century Ireland.

Senior appointments within the academy include elected membership of the Royal Irish Academy (from 2023) and national and international examining appointments (NUI Galway, Ulster University, Queen’s University, Cambridge University and the University of Limerick) as well as membership of the British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS) Advisory Board (ongoing from 2018).  I am also a Deputy Editor of the Women's History Review journal and am serving President of the Women's History Association of Ireland (WHAI). A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, I served two terms on the AHRC’s Peer Review College. I peer review for leading journals and academic publishers and sit on several academic advisory boards.