Aisling Henihan

Shared Space: Infrastructure and Imagination in Derry/Londonderry

Aisling (she/they) is a doctoral student whose work explores post-conflict memory and material culture on the island of Ireland.

Her DPhil research examines infrastructure projects in Northern Ireland that seek to ‘build’ peace by transforming contested landscapes. Focusing on the regeneration of the River Foyle in Derry/Londonderry, she asks how development-led approaches to peacebuilding shape peace as it is imagined, felt, believed and ‘built’ in the everyday. This work builds on her MPhil research on the Peace Bridge in Derry/Londonderry, which considered the material and affective experience of social crisis in encounters with symbolic architecture.

Aisling grew up in North Carolina, USA. She holds a BA in Art History, Geography and Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Oxford, she worked in arts education and public engagement, most recently as a learning producer for The Royal Ballet & Opera.

Her doctoral research is supported by the Clarendon Fund.

Research interests: visual and material culture; museums; memorials and monuments; models and replicas; landscape; memory; heritage studies; performance studies; the US South; Ireland, Northern Ireland.