Keynote Speakers

Jane Brady

Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service

Jayne Brady is the Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Chief Policy Adviser to the First and deputy First Ministers, and Secretary to the Executive.

Jayne took up the post in late 2021, following an extensive career in the private sector. She is the first woman and the first external appointment to the role in the Service’s history.

An engineer at heart, Jayne has extensive board experience and a record of success that transcends blue-chip corporations, start-ups, and funding ecosystems.

Prior to taking up the post of Head of the Civil Service, Jayne was Digital Innovation Commissioner for Belfast, a partner in a venture capital firm with £100M+ funds under management, and co-founder of an artificial intelligence start-up. She was also a member of the UK Government’s Innovation Expert Group which developed its 2021 Innovation Strategy and was appointed an Entrepreneurial Expert for Oxford University in 2020.

Jayne was recognised for services to the economy with an MBE (2018) and two honorary doctorates (2019 & 2022). She has a passion for supporting young people, serving as a counsellor for Childline and board member for Young Enterprise NI. Jayne has a strong, well-established professional network and is a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Irish Academy of Engineers. She is mum to three teenagers.

Emma Markiewicz

London Metropolitan Archives

Emma joined London Metropolitan Archives as Director in early 2022 and is responsible for developing and delivering a large-scale audience development programme to re-imagine how we engage people and make our collections accessible to everyone.

Before joining the City of London Corporation, Emma worked at The National Archives for over 15 years in roles facing the public, government and archives sector and on a diverse range of topics including fundraising, apprenticeships, advocacy and digitisation programmes.

She holds a PhD in History focussing on the study of human hair as a commodity, which took her to many different archives for research and she has been lucky enough to continue visiting archives all over the UK ever since in a professional capacity.

Prior to this, Emma was a field archaeologist, working on research and commercial projects from the south of England to North Africa.

Peter Crooks

Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Trinity College Dublin & Founding Director, ‘Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury’

Peter Crooks is Founding Director of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland research programme, an all-island and international collaboration to create a virtual reality reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, and its collections, which were destroyed at the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in 1922.

From 2018 to 2021, he devised and served as Academic Coordinator for the Trinity Long Room Hub's Multiannual Lecture Series entitled, 'Out of the Ashes: Collective Memory, Cultural Loss and Recovery', which examined the issue of cultural destruction and reconstruction in global contexts from antiquity to the present.

He is Associate Professor in Medieval History in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, having previously held positions at the Institute of Historical Research (London) and the University of East Anglia. He has published widely on the history of Ireland and Britain in the later Middle Ages.

He is editor of the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Britain, vol. 2: 1100–1500. His five-volume Irish Chancery Rolls, c.1300-1500 — which reconstructs and translates into English a key seam of Latin record evidence destroyed in the Four Courts blaze of 1922 — will be published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission.