Dr. Danielle Blaylock is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Shared Education in the School of Education at Queen’s University Belfast. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Maine and and an MA and PhD in Applied Social Psychology from Claremont Graduate University. Before joining the Centre for Shared Education, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and served as adjunct faculty at Argosy University and Fullerton College.

As a social psychologist, her research focuses on intergroup relations, intergroup conflict, and social change, and is closely associated with social identity and contact theory. Her programme of research has two main branches: the first examines the relationship between legitimacy beliefs and social change, and the second focuses on the impact of intergroup structures on intergroup emotions and subsequent intergroup behaviours. Her PhD examined how status differentials between social groups evoke intergroup emotions such as anger and anxiety and how these emotions subsequently impact intergroup relations. Following her PhD, she began a research fellowship at the Institute for Irish Studies, working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars from the University of St. Andrews, Queen’s University, and the University of Limerick, exploring the role of identity in collective events.

In her role as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Shared Education, she is a member of a team conducting a 5-year longitudinal study exploring young people’s attitudes and experiences of intergroup contact. As one of the few longitudinal studies of attitudes to intergroup contact in the UK, the research will shed new light on the complex issues pertaining to schools and intergroup relationships in divided societies.

Danielle has served as the managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations with Drs. John Levine and Michael Hogg and the Encyclopedia of Identity with Drs. Ronald Jackson and Michael Hogg, both published by Sage. Additionally, with Dr. Michael Hogg she co-edited a book on Extremism and the Psychology of Uncertainty published by Blackwell.