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Professor of Political Sociology, Queen's University Belfast

Katy Hayward is Professor of Political Sociology in Queen’s University Belfast and a Senior Fellow in the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank, where she leads a large project on ‘The future and status of Northern Ireland after Brexit’. She has two books recently published. One on the Irish Border for the Sage series ‘What do we know and what should we do about...’, and a co-authored textbook on ‘Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday’ (MUP). In 2019, she was one of 3 academics appointed by the UK government to the technical expert panel of its Alternative Arrangements Advisory Group on Brexit.

As well as being a frequent media commentator, she has presented evidence to numerous parliamentary committees across these islands. She was named Political Studies Communicator of the year by the Political Studies Association of Ireland in 2019 and in 2020 received a special award from the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for her use of Twitter to illuminate and explain the implications of Brexit for the island of Ireland.

Experience

  • –present
    Reader in Sociology, Queen's University Belfast

Education

  • 2002 
    University College Dublin, PhD (Social Science)