Dr Barry Hazley MA, MA, PhD

Research Overview

Dr Barry Hazley is Derby Fellow in Transforming Conflict and AHRC Research Fellow on the project ‘Conflict, Memory & Migration: Northern Irish Migrants & the Troubles in Great Britain’. A social and cultural historian of modern Britain and Ireland, his research focuses mainly on the changing importance of the British-Irish relationship as a context for the shaping of identities and social relations within contemporary British society. Whilst British culture registers a powerful tendency to ‘forget’ the legacies of Anglo-Irish conflict, Dr Hazley’s work shows how the negotiation of Irish identities remained a dynamic force in the evolution of British society after 1945, affecting both how Irish people experienced British society and how British society reimagined itself during an era of profound transformation.

Histories of Migration & Diaspora: the Irish Diaspora in Modern Britain
Dr Hazley’s first monograph, 'Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England: myth, memory and emotional adaption', explores this dynamic in relation to the experiences and reception of Irish labour migrants after 1945. Making extensive use of oral history and social memory theory, it documents how the uneven ‘modernisation’ of English society, including the persistence of popular ambivalence towards Irishness, created both problems and new possibilities for the accommodation and performance of Irish identities. He is currently working on a new collaborative study addressing the distinctive experiences of Northern Irish migrants who settled in Great Britain during the period of the Troubles.

War, Conflict & Memory: the Northern Ireland Troubles & British Society
Building on these themes, Dr Hazley’s current research explores the largely unacknowledged social, cultural and emotional impacts of the Northern Ireland Troubles upon the development of British society after 1969. Focusing in particular on the neglected experiences of three groups, namely Northern Irish migrants who settled in Britain during the period, victims and survivors of the republican bombing campaign in England, and British military veterans of the conflict and their families, this work seeks both to recover the submerged histories of these groups whilst analysing the wider political dynamics conditioning their marginalisation within British cultural memory. Dr Hazley is currently researching a new monograph, provisionally entitled 'Operation Banner & the memory of the Troubles in England: a social and cultural history', which explores these issues via analysis of the memory of the British military experience in Northern Ireland within English society.

Place, Subjectivity & Everyday Life: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in Post-war Britain
In addition to the history of British-Irish relations, Dr Hazley is interested more broadly in the transformation of social and cultural identities within post-1945 British society, particularly in relation to class, gender and the practice of everyday life. He is co-author, with Lynn Abrams, Ade Kearns and Valerie Wright, of a recent social history of public housing ‘schemes’ in post-war Glasgow entitled 'Glasgow: High-rise Homes, Estates and Communities in the Post-war Period'.