Eileen Murphy

Eszter Melis
Apr 12
2 min read

Eileen Murphy (PhD 1998, Queen’s University Belfast) is a bioarchaeologist and Professor of Archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the Co-Director of the Centre for Community Archaeology in Queen’s and has been a leader of the Belfast Branch of the Young Archaeologists’ Club at Queen’s, whose members are aged 6–16 years, since its inception in 2006. Her research has largely focused on Iron Age populations from southern Siberia and on Irish populations of all periods. She has a longstanding interest in funerary practices, including atypical burial rites, and her work on children’s burial grounds (cillíní) in Ireland, which were largely used for the burial of unbaptised babies in post-medieval times, led to a general interest in the archaeology of childhood. She was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP) in 2006 and was the founding editor of its journal Childhood in the Past, a role she has held since 2008. She has published widely, including three co-edited volumes focused on aspects of childhood in the past – Children, Death and Burial: Archaeological Discourses (ed. with M. Le Roy, 2017), Across the Generations: The Old and the Young in Past Societies (ed. with G. Lillehammer, 2018) and Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices (ed. with M. Le Roy, 2023). Her most recent projects have been the Ranelagh Osteoarchaeological Project (2018–2023, funded by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, OA) and the Community Archaeology Programme Northern Ireland (CAPNI, 2024–2027, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.