Born: 23 March 1947, United Kingdom
Died: 6 January 2018
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Meehan, Elizabeth Marian (1947–2018), political scientist, was born on 23 March 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the eldest of four children (alongside Mary, Margaret and David) born to Marian Byas (née Mackenzie) and David Charles Meehan. Her father owned an upholstery business; as the family grew, they moved to the nearby village of West Linton in Peeblesshire. There Meehan attended West Linton primary school and, from 1959–64, Peebles Burgh and County High School, excelling at her studies. She attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1964–5 before joining the UK civil service in 1965, working for eight years in the diplomatic service within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Meehan returned to education when she enrolled in Sussex University in 1973, graduating in 1976 with a first-class Bachelor of Arts (BA) in politics. Admitted to Nuffield College, she began her doctoral studies at the faculty of social studies, University of Oxford, in 1976. Meehan tutored on the Oxford philosophy, politics and economics (‘PPE’) undergraduate course in 1976–8 and was a part-time lecturer at St Hugh’s College (1978–9). In 1979 Meehan took up a post as lecturer in politics at the University of Bath, where she remained until 1991. She held the prestigious Hallsworth fellowship at the University of Manchester (1989–90). Her doctoral (D.Phil.) thesis, completed at Oxford in 1982, was published as Women’s rights at work: campaigns and policy in Britain and the United States (1985). Two early co-edited collections followed: Feminism and political theory (1986) and, with Selma Sevenhuijsen, Equality politics and gender (1991).
In 1991 Meehan became the first female professor of politics in Ireland and the UK when she was appointed to the post at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). Much of Meehan’s ensuing academic scholarship focused on European politics and society, particularly on the evolving nature of the European Community/Union. In 1992 she was appointed as Jean Monnet professor of European social policy at QUB. Influenced by the conclusion of the Maastricht treaty that year, Meehan’s Citizenship and the European Community (1993) expressed her conception of a multilayered citizenship, encompassing subnational, national and supranational components. Her cosmopolitan positing of European citizenship drew on the expanding bedrock of jurisprudence – emanating from the European Court of Justice and the European Convention on Human Rights – establishing novel fundamental political rights. It marked the widening of Meehan’s research interests to encompass law and aspects of sociology.
At QUB, Meehan served as dean of the faculty of economic and social sciences (1995–8), followed by a visiting research fellowship while on sabbatical at the Policy Institute, Trinity College Dublin (1998–9). Her ensuing Free movement between Ireland and the UK: from the ‘common travel area’ to The Common Travel Area (2000) reconciled Ireland and the UK’s distinct mutual migration regime, previously lacking statutory promulgation, with the 1997 EU Treaty of Amsterdam. Meehan was a member of the Irish Social Sciences Research Council (1995–9), then founding director (2001–05) of the QUB Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research. There she led the development of an innovate doctoral research programme – in conjunction with the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin – which drew together policymakers and public servants from either side of the Irish border.
In addition to the European Union, Meehan’s research ranged across gender equality, citizenship, the politics of devolution in Northern Ireland, governance, and political and legal accountability. Continuing her work on European citizenship, in a 1997 article Meehan promoted a theory of citizenship that emanated from moral order arguments, rather than narrowly defined conceptions of nationalism, based on a cosmopolitan construction of political and legal identity.
Meehan fostered interdisciplinary research and spurred collaboration between academics, researchers, governmental bodies and civil society. She was a frequent contributor to the policy research and development activities of the European Parliament, European Commission, EU committee of the regions and the Council of Europe. Her expertise on citizenship and the Common Travel Area (spanning Ireland and the United Kingdom) saw her advise government departments and public bodies in both jurisdictions. Meehan contributed to ‘Devolution and constitutional change’, a major Economic and Research Council (UK) project which assessed the structures and impacts of asymmetric political and constitutional devolution undertaken across the UK after 1999.
Meehan was a founder of the Academy of Social Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, as well as a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 2002 she was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), where she served on council and as a vice-president. Continuing her long-standing interest in cross-border collaboration, Meehan was appointed to the independent Democracy Commission in Ireland, convened in 2003 by the think-tanks TASC (Dublin) and Democratic Dialogue (Belfast) (she was a director of the latter). Within the academic and broader higher education sector, Meehan served on a wide range of bodies, reviews and steering groups. In 2004 Meehan sat on an advisory board on naturalisation and integration for the UK Home Office, signalling the ongoing importance of her scholarship to deliberative political processes.
Outside of her academic work (though often connected), Meehan served on various boards and charitable trusts. She was a trustee of the Scarman Trust (1991), a member of the Northern Ireland Fair Employment Commission (1994–2000), on the advisory board of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (1997), chairperson of the Bryson House charity (1998–2001) and a director of the Youth Research Forum (2006–10). She was also active in the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, which gathered activists from spring 1996 to promote inclusive pluralism within the talks from which the Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998) emerged. (She hosted coalition meetings at her home on Ulsterville Avenue in Belfast.) Throughout her career Meehan gave public lectures and talks to a range of civil society fora.
After her retirement in July 2005, Meehan was professor emerita at the QUB school of law, visiting professor at the school of politics and international relations at University College Dublin, and active in the Institute for British-Irish Studies (2006–09). She also held an honorary position at the school of social and political science at Edinburgh University. Meehan had been the first woman to chair (1993–6) the Political Studies Association (UK) and was afterwards an honorary vice-president. In 2005 the association presented her with a lifetime achievement award for her contribution to political science. The following year she received another lifetime achievement award, this time from the University Association for Contemporary European Studies. The Political Studies Association of Ireland, in 2018, renamed their annual award as the Elizabeth Meehan prize, presented to a leading early-career researcher. In 2018 QUB named undergraduate and postgraduate prizes after Meehan.
Highly regarded by her many research collaborators, colleagues and students, Meehan forged an impressive career addressing gender, feminism, women’s rights, identity, citizenship and pluralism, especially delineating how the EU increasingly framed relations between Ireland and the UK from the 1990s onwards. This body of work appeared in a wide range of publications, including peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, spanning the fields of political science, sociology, law and history. Her Uneasy allies: British-German relations and European integration since 1945 (2000), co-edited with Klaus Larres, captured Meehan’s endeavour to situate the development of European political identities, ethics and rights after the Second World War within their historical environment, parsed through an interdisciplinary lens. Meehan sat on the editorial or advisory boards of eleven journals, reviewed books for over twenty journals, and was an occasional contributor to Fortnight magazine and other publications.
Returning to live in West Linton in retirement, she died unexpectedly at her home on 6 January 2018. Her portrait, painted by John Kindness, hangs in the Great Hall of QUB.