Dr. Maeve Ryan, Senior Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy

Maeve Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, where she co-directs the Centre for Grand Strategy. At the heart of this centre is an ‘applied history’ approach, which aims to bring more historical and strategic expertise to statecraft, diplomacy and foreign policy. Maeve directs the centre’s major research projects and policy-engagement activities, including the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy, the Forum on Future British Strategy, the World Order Study Group, The Engelsberg Programme for Applied History, Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme, ‘Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World’; the Maymester Summer School, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize-funded project on the origins and future of the idea of ‘world order’. She also co-directs the centre’s new Indo-Pacific Programme.

A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Maeve’s research interests include British foreign policy, diplomacy, grand strategy and applied history; global histories of slavery, empire, and humanitarian governance; and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of world order in the 21^st century.

Maeve leads a number of high-impact policy engagement projects, including an ESRC Impact Acceleration-funded project in collaboration with the Cabinet Office National Security Secretariat. Maeve has also acted as a Co-PI on the King’s Together-funded project “Advancing the enforcement of anti-slavery legislation in Mauritania: lessons learned from other African countries”.

Before joining King’s in 2016, Maeve was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at the University of Leicester. She also helped to found the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Geopolitics. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in History from Trinity College Dublin.