Liam Campbell
Director, Mellon Centre for Migration Studies

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Liam Campbell lives outside Plumbridge in the Sperrin Mountains in Co. Tyrone and was born in Burt in the Inishowen peninsula of Co. Donegal. He has recently been appointed as Director of the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster American Folk Park. Previously, he worked as the Built and Cultural Heritage Officer at Lough Neagh Partnership and as a television producer on programmes such as Lesser Spotted Ulster for some twenty years before returning to academia. He has published widely on heritage and environmental issues, especially about the northwest of Ireland. His recent book Room for the River has just been published by Merdog Books. Holding undergraduate degrees from NUI Maynooth and masters degrees from both Queens University Belfast and Ulster University, Liam completed his PhD in 2011 at Ulster University on the cultural heritage of rivers. He is a visiting lecturer at East Tennessee State University where he previously held the Basler Chair for Integration of the Arts and Sciences.

Research Interests

• Landscape and identity
• Settlement and rivers
• Roots and routes – corridors of migration
• Community archaeololgy
• Migration and the environment
• Sense of place and belonging
• Built heritage

Select Publications

Campbell, L. (forthcoming Jan 2022) ( eds with William Burke and William Roulston ) Lough Neagh: An Historical, Environmental and Cultural Atlas, Ulster Historical Foundation.

Campbell, L. 2021 (Jan 2021) “ Room for the River  – Connecting People, Place and Nature “ Merdog Books, Inishowen, Co Donegal.

Campbell, L. 2020 ( Dec 2020 )” Exile, belonging and postcolonialism in an Irish River catchment” in     Kia Whakanuia te Whenua – Celebrating stories of people, place, landscape ( Landscape Foundation, New Zeland )

Campbell, L. (ed) (2013) The Lost Settlement of Dunnalong, Guildhall Press, Derry, 2013

Dr Patrick Fitzgerald
Mellon Centre for Migration Studies

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Paddy was born in Armagh City but now lives in the townland of Letfern near the village of Seskinore in County Tyrone. His PhD research related to the subject of poverty and vagrancy in Early-Modern Ireland (1550-1770) and was awarded by Queen’s University Belfast in 1994. Having been a curator of emigration history at the Ulster American Folk Park since 1990 he became Lecturer & Development Officer at the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies in 1998. Currently he is Head of Research and Development at MCMS.

Research Interests

• Irish Subsistence migration 1550-1850
• Ulster Scots/Scotch-Irish migration and historiography
• Irish Internal migration
• Irish return migration
• Irish and local diasporas

Select Publications

Patrick Fitzgerald & Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007 (Palgrave macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008)

Patrick Fitzgerald & Anthony Russell (eds.), John Mitchel, Ulster and the Great Irish Famine (Irish Academic Press, Newbridge, 2017)

Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘The Seventeenth-Century Irish Connection’ in T.M. Devine & J. Wormald (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford UP, Oxford, 2012), 285-99