Dr Harriet Gray
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Harriet joined the Department in 2017. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Gothenburg, working on a study of conflict-related sexual violence in the African Great Lakes Region. Harriet completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Politics Science in 2015, where her thesis focused on domestic violence in the British military community.

Harriet’s research interests fall within the overlapping fields of critical military studies, critical war studies, and feminist IR. Her work has appeared in journals including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations; Security Dialogue; The RUSI Journal, European Journal of International Relations; Review of International Studies; Gender, Place and Culture; and International Feminist Journal of Politics. Harriet is an Associate Editor of the journals Critical Military Studies and Political Studies.

Twitter @DrHarrietGray

Research

Overview

Harriet’s research interests include gender-based violence, military families, militarism and military power, activist art and memorialisation, and feminist methodologies in the study of International Relations.

Much of her work to date has focused on gender-based violence in military and conflict spaces; specifically in the British military and in (post)conflict settings in the African Great Lakes region. Her work looks broadly across what feminists have termed the 'continuum of violence,' drawing connections between multiple forms of violence across both war and peace and the public and private spheres. 

Harriet is currently writing up the findings of an ESRC New Investigator Grant-funded project looking at the memorialisation of sexual violence across war and peace. The project begins from the assumption that memorialisation is never politically neutral, and analyses its role in feminist politics. It focuses in particular on six memorial projects located across the USA: three dedicated to peacetime sexual violence within the US, and three to the 'comfort women' of the Asia-Pacific War.

In addition, Harriet is also PI on an AHRC-funded project entitled 'Envisioning Vulnerability and Safety Otherwise: Artivist knowledge on gender-based violence in Mexico.' The project uses participatory, arts-based research methods to build knowledge in collaboration with a diverse collection of artivists working against GBV, seeking both to learn more about the diversity of people's experiences of GBV and their everyday resistance strategies and to understand more about the power of ARTivism to break the mould of dominant ways of thinking about GBV. 

Supervision

PhD Supervision:

• Diana Infante-Vargas: Mobility, Gender and its Context in Saltillo, Mexico: An Analysis of Informal Transport Systems through a Gender Lens.
• Tallulah Lines: Art and Security in Feminicidal Cultures: How Women Artists and Activists Prefigure Feminist Security in Oaxaca and Quintana Roo, Mexico
• Nazia Qani: Whispers of Justice: Pashtun Women's Stories of Violence under the Barren Mountains during War and Peace
• Harriet Foreman (Centre for Women's Studies): Exploring the Experiences of the Partners of Non-Citizen Personnel serving in the British Military.
• Lan Vo (Centre for Women's Studies): Sleeping with the Enemy: The Experiences of Vietnamese Mothers of Amerasian Children during and after the Vietnamese-American Conflict (1955-1975).

Dr Harriet Gray welcomes PhD applications in the following areas:

• Conflict-related gender-based violence
• Gender and militarisation
• Military families
• Memorialisation and ARTivism in relation to gender-based violence.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• The Politics of Gender - POL00053I
• Gender, War and Militarism - POL00056H

Postgraduate

• Gendering Politics: An Intersectional Approach - POL00103M