Mary is a researcher, policy analyst and consultant specialising in Libya and the wider Mediterranean. She has worked for organisations including International Crisis Group (ICG), the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the European Council on Foreign Relations and the European University Institute.
She is an Associate at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, an Associate Fellow at ICSR, King’s College London, an Associate Research Fellow at ISPI in Milan and an Associate Researcher at the Mediterranean Platform at the LUISS School of Government in Rome.
Mary is a contributing author to “The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath” an edited volume published by Hurst/Oxford University Press in 2015 and “Violence and Social Transformation in Libya” an edited volume published by Hurst/Oxford University Press in 2023.
She has worked on wider initiatives with UNESCO, the Anna Lindh Foundation, the British Council and other cultural organisations. She has a particular interest in memorialisation processes in post-conflict and divided societies and contributed to the 2020 UN Special Rapporteur report on memorialisation. She is a founding member of the Global Advisory Board of the War Childhood Museum, the world’s only museum dedicated to documenting the experience of children in conflict.
From Ireland, Mary began her journalistic career reporting on post-peace agreement Northern Ireland for domestic and international media. She later spent almost a decade as a roving staff foreign correspondent for the Irish Times, reporting from more than 40 countries with a particular focus on conflict and post-conflict societies. Her work has also appeared in publications such as the Economist, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and the Guardian. She worked on a number of radio documentaries for the BBC, one of which – on post-conflict Northern Ireland – won a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award.
