Centring on Ireland, north and south: Border management; Cross-border conflict and cooperation; EU integration (inc. ‘Brexit’ and the Windsor Framework); Peace and conflict processes; Political sociology; Political discourses, protest and violence.

Katy Hayward is Professor of Political Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast, where she is also co-Director of the Centre for International Borders Research and co-Director of Open Learning - Queen's extensive programme of educational classes for the wider community. She was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2023 and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2020. She is a member of the Europe’s Futures Initiative  and an Eisenhower Fellow.

Professor Hayward has written and presented widely on the topics of Brexit, the 1998 Agreement and the Irish border to media, policy, civic and academic audiences worldwide. She was awarded a special biennial Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize (2018/19) for her work raising public awareness of the implications of Brexit for Ireland’s peace process. The recipient of the ‘Political Communicator of the Year’ award (2019), she has had opinion pieces published in such as Politico, Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Irish Times and has been interviewed by outlets around the world including CNN, NBC, BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Le Monde, Taggespiegel, Radio France, Deutsche Welle, and Al Jazeera.

Outside the University, Katy is a trustee of the British Irish Association and sits on the Council of the Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin). She sits on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy and is a member of the UK Constitution Monitoring Group, which monitors developments in the UK constitution, including government accountability, the rule of law and individual rights.

@katyhayward.bsky.social

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