Professor Graham Dawson
Graham Dawson joined Ulster University as Visiting Professor associated with INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute) in 2024. Previously he was the University of Brighton's Professor of Historical Cultural Studies (2012-22) and co-founder and Director of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (2008-21). He has a PhD from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, where he was a member of the Popular Memory Group (1979-1986).
Graham's research in the field of interdisciplinary Cultural Studies draws on cultural theory, history, literature, cultural geography and psychoanalysis to investigate memories and narratives of lived experience and identity in contexts of war and conflict. Since 1995 his main focus has been on practices of memory, conflict legacies and cultural politics in the Northern Irish Troubles and peace process, encompassing both the North of Ireland and Britain.
His work is informed by, and contributes to, transnational debates concerning the cultural dimensions of 'dealing with the past' within conflict transformation processes. His particular interest lies in the temporal and emotional dynamics of personal memories and subjectivities negotiated in oral histories, life stories and other forms, considered in relation to geographical locations, public narratives, hegemonic representations, marginalised histories and historical justice. He has a particular interest in local community-based memorywork and a close relationship with the Dúchas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council, West Belfast.
Graham is author of two ground-breaking monographs, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994) and Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (2007); as well as numerous journal articles, book chapters and other publications.
He has co-edited four innovative books including The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (2000) and The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories (2017). He was Co-I on a major AHRC-funded oral history project, Conflict, Migration and Memory: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain (2018-22), with work towards publications continuing.
His next monograph, Afterlives of the Troubles: Life Stories and the Culture of Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, will be published by Manchester UP. He is a member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective whose book, Unsettling Memories of Violence: Complex Temporalities in ‘Post-conflict’ Societies, is under contract; and on the editorial committee of an online publication emerging from the AHRC network, 'Sensing Conflict: Towards an Sociosomatic History of Northern Ireland's Troubles' (2022-23).
