PhD SOCIOLOGY

Dr. Mary Benson
Cityscapes, gentrification, place, community and visual representations. Current research focuses on urban agriculture.

Dr. Delma Byrne
Research interests include social stratification in education and the labour market spanning the primary, second-level and higher education sectors as well as post-secondary education and training, transitions between education and the labour market and the evaluation of educational interventions.

Dr. Barry Cannon
Research interests are on Latin American politics, with particular expertise on Peru, Venezuela and Central America, especially on issues of democratisation, power relations, Left and Right politics, civil society, and development. Current research focuses on opposition politics in Venezuela, right wing politics in Latin America, and, comparisons between collective reactions to crisis in Latin America and in Ireland and Europe.

Dr. Brian Conway
Research interests include sociology of religion, collective memory, history of Irish sociology. Current research focuses on examining Catholic public discourses and institutional arrangements, trends and patterns in the Catholic workforce, and religious institutional responses to scandal, all in comparative perspective.

Prof. Mary P. Corcoran
The Irish migratory experience, public culture, and urban transformation and change. Professor Corcoran is currently engaged in research on urban agriculture initiatives and urban food policy. 

Prof. Colin Coulter
Research interests include development studies, global politics, Marxism, ethnicity and nationalism, popular culture and in particular popular music and Northern Irish politics and society.

Prof. Laurence Cox
Research interests include social movement research (movement waves, alterglobalisation and anti-austerity movements, European social movements, movement theorising, protest policing, knowledge and learning production in social movements, activist sustainability), Buddhist Studies (Buddhism and Ireland, early western Buddhists in Asia), new religious movements, sociology of knowledge and culture (history of ideas, sociology of intellectuals, counter culture), working-class studies (community organising, oral history), social theory (western Marxism, socialist feminism), and methodology (participatory action research, community research).

Dr. Pauline Cullen
Research interests include political sociology, gender inequality, social movements, civil society and state relations, nongovernmental organisations, social policy and European Integration, coalitions between diverse constituencies, activism on social rights beyond national settings. 

Prof. G. Honor Fagan
Research interests include Human Security, Gender and Development Governance, and Social Sustainability.

Dr. Eoin Flaherty
I am interested in how patterns of inequality are formed and maintained, and how they change over time. I study these processes with a particular focus on income inequality during the late 20th/early 21st century, and instances of famine during the 19th century (mainly Ireland). I am also interested in how human societies have formed systems of cooperation and managed resources collectively, and whether such systems were resilient to environmental stress.  I am also interested in: Top incomes and the 'super-rich', labour's share of national income, time series and pooled time series cross-section analysis. Financialisation, rentiers, and power resources.  Famine, common-pool resource systems, primitive communism, and nineteenth-century Ireland. Complexity theory, human ecology, and environmental sociology.  

Prof. Jane Gray
Research and teaching interests include families and households, comparative-historical sociology, life history analysis.  Her current research focuses on: life histories and social change in twentieth-century Ireland,  family and community, gender, household economies and social change.

Dr. Rebecca King Ó Riain
Research and teaching interests include globalisation, emotions and technology, racial/ethnic beauty pageants; critical race theory, qualitative methods, interracial marriage and multiracial people. Her current research explores the ‘Globalisation of Love’ through qualitative research with transnational, mixed couples and their children looking at uses of digital technology to create and maintain global emotional networks.

Dr. Daryl Martin
My research interests are in the sociological aspects of architectural design, especially in the field of healthcare architecture; cultural representations of place, especially photographic portraits of cities; landscape and spatial politics, especially with respect to the position of religious architecture in contemporary urban environments; and urban cultures, especially the digitally mediated use of public space.

Prof. Mary Murphy
Research interests include the impact of globalisation on welfare states, the political mediation of social policy reform, local governance and institutional mechanisms to support social innovation, social inclusion and citizenship, gender and social welfare, commodification, conditionality and welfare to work policies.

Prof. John O’Brennan
Research interests include the process and politics of European Union enlargement, the EU's relationship with the western Balkans and prospective enlargement to South Eastern Europe; the dynamics of EU external relations; EU-Russian relations, constructivist theories of International Politics; and the identity dimension to European integration. I am also very interested in Ireland's experience of European integration, its relationship with the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty debate in Ireland.

Prof. Seán Ó Riain
Research interests are in the sociology of work, economic sociology, comparative and global political economy and social inequality.  Specific areas of interest include work organisation and workplace regimes; developmental states, the global knowledge economy, economic liberalism, changing European societies,

Dr. Paul Ryan
Research interests include masculinities, gay and lesbian studies, social movements and qualitative research methods specifically the use of life history

Dr. Eamonn Slater
Research interests include the structure of modernity, the heritage industry (including tourism), the social construction of landscape and the environment, visual sociology and historical sociology. All of these sociological areas are investigated with a special emphasis on Irish society.

Dr. Elena Zambelli
My research interests include the regulation and commodification of sex and intimacy; intimate mobilities; mixed-race and mixed-status intimacies; whiteness, race and racisms in Europe; migrations, everyday bordering and resistances; gender and power in the Middle East and North Africa region; Palestine and decolonial solidarities.

For further details on the research specialisms within the Department please visit: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/sociology/our-people