Disciplinary Lead, Social Policy, 2020-2023

International Liaison, Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology 2015 -2020.

Editorial board, Ageing & Society 2018- present.

I have been a member of the ARK Ageing programme at Queen's since 2014. I have found the Faculty of Arts and Humanities an extremely fruitful environment in which to work and so have developed a range of inter-disciplinary studies of ageing with colleagues. Initiatives include the Lively Project funded by the Wellcome Trust, which used material culture to explore the meaning of living a long life and an AHRC funded project called Dementia in the Minds of Characters and Readers.

Previous work made a contribution to policy formulation and critique in the area of civil society engagement with the State, in particular on corporatism and policies for disadvantaged groups in the Republic of Ireland. I was also one of team of researchers on Changing Generations, a longitudinal, grounded theory study of solidarity between generations in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.sparc.tcd.ie/generations/). In recent years, my work has taken a more global focus, idetifying policy responses to ageing populations as problematic in a range of country context. 

I am keen to support applications for postgraduate research in any of the above areas but especially on furthering our understanding of ageing and older people, cultural gerontology, politics of ageing or gender scholars with an interest in ageing societies. 

I am currently supervising Angel Leira Pernas whose work builds on the Lively Project and is funded by DfE award and Murchana Kaushik who is researching intergenerational transmission of sectarian values through the Tezpur-QUB knowledge exchange programme. 

I am interested in supervising PhD students on social policy in ageing societies, cultural gerontology and projects relating to lifecourse issues which use either qualitative or participatory research methods. 

Programme Director, Social Policy, 2018-2021

Published textbook Critical Questions for Ageing Societies, September 2020 (with Paul Nash at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, USA). This book has been nominated for the Richard Kalish Award 2021 for innovation in research and publication in aging. 

Student nominated University Teaching Award, 2019.