Professor
Catherine is Director of UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, Vice-Principal for Research and Innovation at UCD College of Arts and Humanities, and President of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland.
An award-winning researcher in her own right, her pioneering work on the history of prisons and mental health in Ireland and UK led to the co-authored book Disorder Contained, with Prof Hilary Marland, University of Warwick, and the highly acclaimed play 'The Examination,' co-produced with Dublin theatre group, Brokentalkers. The play won ‘Best Production’ at the 23rd Irish Times Theatre Awards and the Dublin Fringe Festival Awards, and performer Willie White, who suffered psychiatric illness in prison, also won ‘Best Actor’ at the Dublin Fringe. In addition, Catherine worked with artist Dr Sinead McCann on an art installation, The Trial, and with Dr Oisín Wall on a historical exhibition, both at Kilmainham Gaol Museum.
For the academic, cultural, health and policy impact of this research and innovative dissemination to the public, which toured in Ireland and the UK, Catherine won the 2020 UCD Research Impact Competition.
Historical perspectives on women in prison from her Wellcome Trust research were captured in the piece 'Disturbed minds and disruptive bodies,' examining how prison officers tried to regulate women’s minds and bodies in the second half of the 1800s, and how some women resisted.
Catherine's work on the intersection of mental health and ethnicity and migration was captured in another play, 'A Malady of Migration,' a theatrical examination of diaspora, displacement and mental disorders in the 19th Century - arising from a collaboration between researchers and theatre company Talking Birds.