Dr Erin Geraghty

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate based in the Religious Studies department here at the OU. I am working on the Leverhulme-funded project, Anti-Catholicism in the UK Since 1945. This project is an interdisciplinary study of prejudice; combining expertise in psychology and history to understand historic and contemporary attitudes towards Catholicism. Through this work, we aim to demonstrate how history and psychology can complement each other in developing methodologies that help us to better understand forms of prejudice. 

I am also working on my first monograph provisionally entitled, Imperial Feminists and the Irish Question: Collaboration, Resistance, and the Limits of Solidarity, 1900-1921, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2026. The book will examine the participation of English feminist-socialists in the Irish socio-political movements (suffrage, labour, and pacifism) of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

I completed my PhD in history at the University of Warwick in 2022 (funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities), where I also taught undergraduate modules relating to social, imperial, and military history. Prior to joining the OU, I was an Associate Lecturer at the University of the West of England (2022-2023), where I taught modules relating to British history, history of gender and sexuality, criminial history, and public history. Following that, I was a Teaching Associate in Modern Women's History at the University of Nottingham (2023-2024), where I convened the second-year module, ‘Villains or Victims? White Women and the British Empire, c. 1840-1980’, taught on a variety of first-year history modules, and supervised both undergraduate and MA dissertations in history.