Jane Ohlmeyer (Prof), MRIA, FBA, FTCD, FRHistS, is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin. She was a driving force behind the 1641 Depositions Project and the development of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. She chaired the Irish Research Council (2015-21). In 2023 received an Advanced ERC for VOICES, a project on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland.  She is the author or editor of numerous articles and 14 books.  Her latest Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2023) is based on the 2021 Ford Lectures in Oxford.  In 2023 she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.   She is currently working with Briona Ni Dhiarmada on a booked called From that Small Island. The story of the Irish which is based on a 4-part documentary and a feature which won the Best International Documentary award at the 2025 Newport Beach Film Festival. 

Roisín Higgins (Prof): is Professor of History at Maynooth University. Her research focuses on the dynamic relationship between past and present, and the ways in which individuals and societies remember and commemorate difficult and contested histories. Roisín’s project, ‘Sensing the Troubles: Living through Conflict in Northern Ireland, is an examination of embodied memories of everyday lives during the Troubles She is co-editor of ‘Aftershocks: The Sensory Afterlives of Conflict’ which will be published in 2027. 

Susan McKay is one of Ireland’s most trusted commentators on the North.  From Derry, she is an author and award-winning journalist.  Since 2022, she has been the Press Ombudsperson.  Her books include “Northern Protestants – On Shifting Ground” (Blackstaff, 2022), ‘Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People’ (Blackstaff, 2000), and ‘Bear in Mind These Dead’ (Faber 2007).  Her journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Field Day Review, Dublin Review, and the Irish Times, and she was the Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune.  Her essays have been widely anthologized.  In 2019 she received an Arts Council NI Major Individual award. She was a founder of the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre in the 1980s and the CEO of the National Women’s Council of Ireland from 2009 to 2012.