Dr Graham Dawson

Dr Graham Dawson is a Reader in Cultural History. His first degree was in English with Cultural and Community Studies from the University of Sussex. He studied as a postgraduate at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, where he worked as a member of the Popular Memory Group from 1979-1986 and was awarded a doctorate in 1991.

Dawson's first book, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994) has been acclaimed internationally as challenging, innovative, original, magisterial and essential reading. It is being actively used and cited by researchers in diverse fields of study in, inter alia, Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, France, Germany, South-east Asia and South Africa. Since 1995 the main focus of his research has been on questions of cultural memory, violence and conflict resolution in the Irish Troubles and the peace process. This has resulted in numerous articles and a second monograph, Making Peace with the Past ? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles, to be published by Manchester University Press in November 2007. He has also participated in national and international networks involved in the study of memory, co-editing three books - on the politics of war memory and commemoration, on trauma, and on contested spaces and the representation of conflicted pasts - and contributing to others. Alongside continuing work on the Irish peace process and legacies of the Troubles in Ireland and Britain, his current interests lie in the cultural dimensions of dealing with the past within conflict resolution processes, involving questions of memory, imaginative geography, social justice, and human rights.