About Us
Learn more about or researchers.
Charlie Lynch
I am one of the project’s two researchers and am based at Ulster University. I’m a historian of sexualities and religion in the late twentieth century. My doctoral research at the University of Glasgow explored ideas about heterosexuality, religious cultures, and moral change in late twentieth century Scotland.
I am at present completing a book based upon and expanding this research. Long fascinated by conflicts and scandals in regional towns, my journal article on a localised moral panic in the 1960s was published by Twentieth Century British History. Since then, I have moved back to my native Northern Ireland and shifted my focus to helping uncover the complex LGBT+ history of the province.
I am especially interested in questions of religious subjectivity and negotiation, and part of this work, examining the biography of a gay man from Co. Down who left religion in the 1940s and can be read at History Workshop Online. Another strand to my work, assisting the social historian, Callum Brown, has been exploring how the ethical non-religious sought to reshape the moral landscape of twentieth century England. The book which resulted from this project has recently been published by Bloomsbury.
Maurice Casey
I am one of the project’s two researchers and am based at Queen’s University Belfast. I received my DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in 2020. From 2018-19, I was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University. Before joining Queen’s, I curated two major exhibitions as the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs Historian in Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum from 2020 to 2022. I have broad public history experience across print and broadcast media, including contributions to series commissioned by TG4, Audible and the BBC. My current book project is a history of twentieth century communism told through the elaborate, border-crossing origins of a single 20th century queer romance.
Tom Hulme
I teach and research modern history at Queen’s University Belfast, and with Leanne I’m one of the two leads for the project. My background is in urban history, and the culture of everyday life especially, from roughly the late 19th century to mid 20th century – the period that the world was becoming ‘modern’. When I moved to Belfast in 2016, I became interested in queer history, and started looking into the lives of men who were arrested for same-sex ‘crimes’ in the city a hundred years ago. That small seed has grown into a big gay tree, and I am now fascinated by all aspects of Northern Ireland’s rich queer history. I am currently working on a book about Belfast's queer men from 1890 to 1960 and their experiences of things like cruising the city for sex, forging friendships with other men, and how they were either rejected or accepted by their families and communities. I have written a short article about some of this research for Gay Times (Jan, 2019 - if you would like a digital copy, please do get in contact via email), given a talk that is available online, and I wrote an article on Belfast during the First World War in Irish Historical Studies (2021). I often tweet about my research on @tomhulme87.
Leanne McCormick
I am one of the leads on the project with Tom. I research and teach on modern Irish social history at Ulster University. My research has focused on women’s and gender history, history of medicine and history of sexuality from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century with a focus on the north of Ireland/Northern Ireland and the Irish diaspora. I am particularly interested in female queer relationships which are harder to uncover than for their male counterparts . I also work on the Bad Bridget project with a recent publication Bad Bridget: crime mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women, and was a co-author of the Research Report on Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland, 1922-1990.