Philip McDermott

TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP

Professor Philip McDermott is Professor of Sociology in the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences and a Fellow of INCORE. He teaches across the undergraduate Sociology programme and achieved Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in 2018. He is Course Director for four new undergraduate Sociology combinations at the Magee campus.

Philip has contributed to a range of Masters programmes, including the MA in Museums and Cultural Heritage, and previously taught on the MSc in Peace and Conflict Studies. From 2021–2024 he taught Sociology of Health in the Graduate Entry Medical School.

He has produced pedagogical reports and textbook materials for Youth Work education through the ERASMUS+ Youth Work and You programme (with Breda Friel), now used in universities in Ireland, Australia, Finland and Estonia. He has also developed sociolinguistic teaching materials for global business education, published as a Palgrave textbook chapter and used in business schools in Edinburgh, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.

Professor McDermott has supervised seven PhD completions. He is external examiner for Masters programmes at Heriot‑Watt University and Trinity College Dublin, and has examined PhDs at Cardiff University and the University of Aberdeen.

RESEARCH

Professor McDermott’s research focuses on cultural identity and heritage, particularly state–minority relations involving linguistic and migrant communities. He was Ulster University’s Distinguished Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2021–2022).

Philip's work on language policy and migrant multilingualism contributed to a REF 2021 impact case study for Modern Languages (Unit 26). A second strand examines heritage, migration and memory in Northern Ireland, including research on Derry’s UK City of Culture year.

His research has been funded by the British Academy, AHRC, the National Trust and the Department for International Development. He was Principal Investigator on an AHRC/Living Legacies project on WWI commemoration among migrant communities and Co‑Investigator/Work Package Lead on an AHRC project on Museums, Crisis and Covid‑19.

McDermott is author of a monograph on migrant community languages in Northern Ireland. His articles appear in journals including English Today, Current Issues in Language Planning, Identities, Ethnicities, Language Problems and Language Planning, Ethnopolitics, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Memory Studies.

He has edited an academic volume, four special issues and a collection with the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. His chapters appear in volumes published by Routledge, Lit Verlag, Manchester University Press, Sage and Palgrave.

In 2015-2016 he held a Charlemont Scholarship from the Royal Irish Academy and has also delivered keynote lectures at UCL, Cambridge, Helsinki and the Irish Museum Association. He has acted as an expert reviewer for the European Commission, the National Academy of Poland, the Velux Foundation and AHRC, and contributed to the Indylan project on mobile technologies for indigenous language learning.

Philip continues to work with NGOs representing ethnic minority communities in Northern Ireland and received a Breaking Barriers Award at the Northern Ireland Race Equality Awards in 2021.