Katy Hayward is Professor of Political Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast and a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, where she leads a major ESRC-funded project on the future status of Northern Ireland after Brexit.

She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2020), an Eisenhower Fellow (2019) and a Fellow in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University.


Professor Hayward is an internationally recognised expert on Brexit and Northern Ireland/Ireland, particularly with respect to the Irish border. She was appointed to the technical expert panel of the UK government’s Alternative Arrangements Advisory Group on Brexit (2019) and has given evidence before many parliamentary committees in the UK, Ireland and EU.

Katy is author of over 300 publications and many research reports, and has also(co)authored several books including What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...the Irish Border (2021), Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland (2017) and Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday (2021).

Katy was the lead researcher and author of four reports (2012-2021) for the Irish Central Border Area Network on the impact of Brexit on the Irish border, an expert on Northern Ireland for the UK Constitution Monitoring Group, and a member of the Working Group on Referendums on Irish Unification led by the UCL Constitution Unit.