Peter Gray took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Cambridge before holding research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's, and at Downing College, Cambridge. He taught Irish and British history at the University of Southampton 1996-2005, before returning to Belfast to take up the positions of Professor of Modern Irish History and Director of Research in Irish and British History at QUB. In 2004 Professor Gray was the Burns Library Visiting Professor in Irish Studies at Boston College, MA, was Eaton visiting fellow at the University of New Brunswick in 2015 and O'Donnell Fellow in Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne in 2023. He was chair of the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for the Historical Sciences 2007-10, and is a member of the editorial board of Irish Historical Studies. He was Head of the School of History and Anthropology 2010-15 and is has been Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at QUB since 2016.

Professor Gray's research specializes in the history of British-Irish relations c.1800-70, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845-50 and the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. He has interests in the history of 19th-century political economy and social thought, in comparative imperial history (especially 19th-century Ireland and India), in historical memory and commemoration, and in the history of the Irish lord lieutenancy. He directed the EPPI project to digitise Parliamentary Papers relating to Ireland 1800-1922, and was PI on the AHRC-funded research project 'Welfare and Public Health in Belfast and the north of Ireland, c.1800-1973'. He has recently completed a biography of the Ulster Radical William Sharman Crawford (1780-1861).

Professor Peter Gray teaches on the following programmes / modules:

Undergraduate

Postgraduate