Professors Emeriti/ae in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Owen Hargie

Emeritus Professor of Communication

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Owen Hargie is Emeritus Professor in the School of Communication & Media. He was full-time academic at Ulster University for over 40 years, in posts including Professor and Head of School of Communication and Director of the Communication Research Unit.

He is Associate Fellow, and Honorary Life Member of the British Psychological Society, and Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. He is an elected member of the prestigious Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters; foreign citizens considered for membership must be acknowledged leaders in their respective fields as the Society is restricted to a total membership of 400.

He was Professor II at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for 10 years. He has also been Associate Professor at a number of prestigious British and European universities and was a founding member of the influential European Communication Association.

His special areas of interest are in the fields of interpersonal, health, organisational, and inter-cultural communication. He has published 30 books in these fields including: Auditing Organizational Communication; Researching the Troubles, and the best-selling Skilled Interpersonal Communication, which is in itseighth edition.

His co-authored book, International Public Relations: Perspectives from Deeply Divided Societies won the US National Communication Association Award for 2017 PR Book of the Year.

He has also published over 130 Journal articles detailing his numerous externally funded research projects. He has been funded by major bodies including Leverhulme, OFMDFM, and the European Union. Two examples are:

• He was a key player in research funded (€1.4 million) by the EU for a major European project involving HEIs in Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, Spain and Greece on communication in the face of terrorism. The project led to the publication of the widely cited Terrorism Crisis Communication Manual for Public Authorities. Cordis Project ID 218285
• He was funded by a grant of £243,572 from OFMDFM for a project on the exclusion of different groups from sport in NI, resulting in the publication of the influential Report: Social Exclusion and Sport in Northern Ireland The Executive Office

He has pioneered methodologies on auditing internal communications in organisations and is a consultant on communication for numerous public and private sector organisations throughout the world. His clients in the UK have included Bombardier, Boots, Coats Viyella, Littlewoods, Searle Pharmaceuticals, the BBC, and Baker Hughes.

In recognition of his outstanding research achievements over several decades he received the Senior Distinguished Research Fellowship award from Ulster University.

Richard Ekins

Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies

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Richard Ekins is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies at Ulster University, appointed in 2009. A sociologist, psychoanalyst, and musicologist, his interdisciplinary career spans law, psychoanalysis, jazz, and gender studies. He began with an Ll.B. Hons in Law (University of Birmingham, 1966), followed by a PhD in Sociology on George Herbert Mead and the Sociology of Knowledge (University of London, 1973–78), including study at the University of Chicago and with Mead scholar David L. Miller at the University of Texas at Austin.

He later earned an M.Med.Sc. in Psychotherapy (Queen’s University Belfast, 1989) and trained as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society and IPA (1996). In 2011, he completed an MA in Popular Music Studies (University of Liverpool), followed by doctoral research in jazz studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ekins has published ten books and over 190 articles and chapters. He was among the first in the world to pioneer a social constructionist approach to transgender studies in the late 1970s, challenging dominant medico-psychiatric models. He founded and directed the Transgender Archive at Ulster University (1986–2010), the first of its kind established within a university.

He co-authored The Transgender Phenomenon (with Dave King), named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2007. His psychoanalytic scholarship includes the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Anna Freud: Selected Writings (2015, with Ruth Freeman), reflecting his clinical experience and engagement with Freudian traditions.

A former jazz musician and current New Orleans jazz record producer for 504/La Croix Records, Ekins has since 2005 published on Early Jazz and New Orleans Revivalism in academic and specialist journals, focusing on the social construction of authenticity. His book The Politics of Authenticating: Revisiting New Orleans Jazz (2023, with Robert Porter) explores these themes, with a second volume Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Authenticating forthcoming (2026).

He has also authored two books with Just Jazz magazine: The Genesis and Exodus of Preservation Hall: The Ken Grayson Mills Story (2024) and The Birthing of Preservation Hall: The Barbara Glancey Reid Story (2026).

Ekins is collaborating with Microsoft Copilot AI companion on autoethnographic work, including earlier publications on Dorothy Richardson. His next book, Grounded Theory and The Politics of Authenticating: A Grounded Theory of Grounded Theory (with Barry Gibson and Robert Porter), builds on their article ‘“Time-Tripping” and Memory-Making: A Grounded Theory of Grounded Theory’ (Symbolic Interaction, 2025).

• Richard Ekins - PURE profile
• La Croix Records website

Máire Messenger Davies

Emerita Professor of Media Studies

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Professor Messenger Davies joined Ulster University from the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, in 2004 as the Director of the Centre for Media Research, a post she served in until 2010, and then, again between 2014 and 2016.

As such she helped to guide the Centre to success in the 2008 RAE and the REF in 2014. Her research specialism is the relationship between children/young people and the media, particularly television. This has involved key policy areas,  especially regulation, and the impact of new technology.

She has carried out policy research for Ofcom, the former Broadcasting Standards Council, the BBC’s research department and the DCMS as well as AHRC funded research on young people and news. Between 2015 and 2019 she served on the Board of the independent press regulator, Impress, and chaired its Code Committee.

Máire started her career as a newspaper and, later, a magazine journalist after gaining a BA in English from Trinity College Dublin in 1968. In 1988, combining journalism with part time study,  she obtained a PhD in psychology at the University of East London, researching memory and attention for film and TV.

Between 1990 and 1994 she taught at the College of Communication in  Boston University, in the USA and received a six month Fellowship at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, to continue her studies on media literacy, which resulted in Fake, Fact and Fantasy: Children’s Interpretation of Television Reality: 1997).

Other books on children and communication include Television is Good for Your Kids, (Hilary Shipman:1989, 2001), ‘Dear BBC’: Children, television-storytelling and the public sphere, (Cambridge University Press: 2001), and Children, Media and Culture, (Open University Press: 2010).

Having both an arts and social science background, she has specialised in teaching reluctant arts students scientific research methods and is proud of some of the excellent research these students have produced.

She co-wrote Practical Research Methods for Media and Cultural Studies: Making People Count (Edinburgh University Press: 2006) with Nick Mosdell, a former Cardiff University colleague, partly drawing on this experience.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her continuing research interest in popular culture led to a collaboration with Prof Roberta Pearson of Nottingham University on a detailed 12 year production study of the TV and film franchise, Star Trek with the co-operation of one of its stars, Sir Patrick Stewart. Their book, Star Trek and American Television, was published by California University Press in 2014.

Married to a fellow former journalist, she has four grownup children and three grandchildren. These three continue to inform her thinking on the cultural world they are growing up in, including the huge changes in technology now available to them. The young continue to be a valuable source of information and enlightenment.