Professor Marianne Elliott, OBE was born in 1948 in County Down, Northern Ireland). An Irish historian, she was a Research Fellow at University College, and at the University of Liverpool, and Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester. She was a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and in 1993, became the Andrew Geddes and John Rankin Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool. She is also the Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the university.
She has written extensively on Irish history, with publications such as Wolfe Tone (1989), Catholics of Ulster: A History (2000) and Robert Emmet (2003).