Dr. Anna Bryson

Dr Anna Bryson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queens University. Belfast. Her research has developed along three closely related lines: modern Irish history, socio-legal studies and transitional justice. 

She is the 2016 winner of the Queen’s University Vice-Chancellor's Research Impact Prize. 

Anna has considerable experience of attracting funding for and managing complex and sensitive projects focusing on various aspects of ‘dealing with the past’ and serves as a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. She is currently working across a number of RCUK-funded projects including 'Apologies, Abuses and Dealing with the Past', 'Lawyers, Conflict and Transition' and ‘Brexit and Northern Ireland: The Constitutional, Conflict Transformation, Human Rights and Equality Consequences’. She will commence work in 2021 on an AHRC-funded collaborative project with the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in Oxford and the British Library.

Anna has to date published three books (two sole-authored and one co-authored) and recently signed a contract for a fourth book – a co-authored monograph with Cambridge University Press. In addition, she has published numerous peer-reviewed articles as well as an edited special collection, book chapters, training manuals and specialist reports.

As part of this project on ‘Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland’, Anna has given oral evidence at Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Good Friday Agreement (2018). She has also co-authored a number of collaborative papers with local NGOs and academic colleagues on legacy issues. This includes a co-authored expert report on ‘Apologies in Transitional Justice’ commissioned by the UN.

Anna is currently chair of the leading human rights NGO, the Committee on the Administration of Justice. She has served on the Board of a number of cross-border and cross-community organisations including the Centre for Cross-Border Studies and Diversity Challenges. Anna has also provided advice to dozens of oral history projects in the course of the last twenty years – as an advisory board member, as a consultant and in her capacity as the Northern Ireland regional co-ordinator for the Oral History Society.