Maria Cullen is a postdoctoral research associate on the European Research Council project (opens in a new window)‘Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Sanctuary on the Seas: A Global History of Boat Refugees since the 1940s’. As part of the project, she is researching the journeys of Vietnamese boat refugees across the South China Sea from the 1970s to 1990s. More broadly, her research interests lie in the social and political backgrounds that inform humanitarian action, along with the tensions that arise in interactions between humanitarians and the populations they engage with, including highly organised refugee movements. Her forthcoming monograph with Manchester University Press is entitled ‘Cold War Humanitarians: NGOs as National Political Actors in the Global South’. Maria is also an affiliate of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute in the University of Manchester, where she was a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Developing Humanitarian Medicine’ project before coming to UCD. She completed her PhD studies in the University of Galway in 2023, where her work was supported by the Irish Research Council. Maria has also shared her research and collaborated with humanitarian practitioners in MSF and its Centre de réflexion sur l’action et les savoirs humanitaires.
Maria's research engages withthe politics of humanitarian aid in conflicts and the relationship between humanitarian NGOs and military actors.
Full details on her UCD staff profile (opens in a new window)here.