I began my research career as an historian, spending a year in Derry in 1987 doing archival research and oral historyinterviews for a Research MA on Derry Before the Troubles under the supervision of Prof Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh in Galway. The thesis looked at the origins of the civil rights movement and the conflict in the 1950s and 1960s. After spending a year living in Berlin (198990) I started a PhD in politics at Queens University Belfast with Prof Paul Bew in 1990, looking at the escalation of the Northern Irelandconflict in the early 1970s in Derry. The thesis was published asthe book From Civil rights to Armalites. For a number of years I was concerned primarily with the online world (establishing the University of Ulsters Conflict Data Service and writing two textbooks on Internet research) but since around 2008I have focused myresearch once againon conflict and peace.I have spent time as a visiting scholar at Boston College; Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa;the University of California, Berkeley; the Annenberg School for Communication, USC; Queens University Belfast; the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; the University of Auckland, and the University of Otago.

My main research interests are in conflict, negotiation, peace processes, transnational mobilisation,territory and new technologies. My current researchfocuseson the United States and the Northern Ireland conflict.I havepublished extensively on the history of the Northern Ireland conflict, on peace negotiations and on territorial conflict. Mymost recent book,Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in the Northern Ireland Conflict provides the first full-length study of the secret negotiations and back-channels that were used in repeated efforts to end the Northern Ireland conflict.It was awarded the Brian Farrell book prize of the Political Studies Association of Ireland and wasone of four booksshortlisted for the 27thChristopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. It was awarded a Special Commendation Prize in the National University of Ireland Historical Research Prize. I was founding convener of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Violence (with Dr Lorenzo Bosi) and of the Political Studies Association of Ireland Specialist Group on Peace and Conflict. I have organised numerous conferences, workshops and panels on the theme of peace and conflict in recent years.

I am committed to innovative teaching methods that maximize student engagement, that allow students to act as co-creators of knowledge, and that integrate research and teaching. My central goal is to generate a sense of community and intellectual excitement that motivates students, makes them more ambitious, and spurs them on to learn and to connect more enthusiastically with the subject. I do this through group discussions, class exercises, assignments, and opinion polls that allow students to express their own ideas, to generate new knowledge, and to build relationships with their fellow students.Since I first began teaching more than twenty years ago I have sought out new and better ways of engaging and motivating students. I have incorporated ideas from a wide range of sources, from the Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the National University of Ireland Galway which I completed in 2013; from regular discussions with colleagues in Galway and internationally; and through short courses on new teaching technologies offered by the Centre for Education in Learning and Teaching at the University ofGalway.