ProfessorJudith Harford

Judith Harford, BA, MA HDipEd, PhD, FRHistS FAcSS

Judith Harford is Full Professor of Education at the School of Education, University College Dublin. She is a board member of the Equality Studies Centre and a Fellow of the Geary Institute at UCD. Her research areas are history of education and education policy, with a particular focus on gender and social class. The author of over eighty articles and chapters, her books include The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2008); Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922-67 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); A Cultural History of Education in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922-67 (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is a member of the editorial boards of History of Education Quarterly (USA), Encounters in the Theory and History of Education (Canada) and Irish Educational Studies. A Fulbright Scholar in the Social Sciences, she is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society, London and the National Academy of Social Sciences, UK. Funded by the Ireland Canada University Foundation, she was awarded the prestigious Flaherty Visiting Professorship in 2017. She has acted as an international advisor to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Research Council of Finland and the Estonian Research Council. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge, she has also held visiting scholar appointments at Harvard University, Boston College and the University of Toronto. She contributes regularly to the national press on educational issues and was VP for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Social Sciences and Law, UCD in the period 2018-2021. She was awarded the Irish Research Council Impact Researcher of the Year Award for 2022 in recognition of her work in the area of gender and social class inequalities in education. She has received a range of University College Dublin awards in recognition of excellence in research, teaching, and equality, diversity and inclusion.