Elizabeth’s sudden death has left bereft her large extended family and her numerous grieving friends. She was a generous friend of Government and Opposition: a long-serving member of the Board of the journal and a source of wise advice to successive editors.
But she was much more. Elizabeth was a pioneer. She was an institutional pioneer. She was a leader of the first generation of women in political studies who made a mark on the discipline; that culminated in her election as the first woman chair of the Political Studies Association from 1993 to 1996. She was a pioneer of cross-party and cross-faith dialogue during her distinguished service as a professor at Queen’s University Belfast from the 1990s through to the millennium. And she was a pioneer in building bridges between academic researchers and the world of practical policy-making. Elizabeth was also an intellectual pioneer. She was among the first to document the sources of exclusion experienced by women in political life. She was among the first to explain the changing nature of citizenship in the age of cosmopolitanism. And she led the way in documenting the significance of the jurisprudence of the European Union for social policy and social citizenship.
Her many achievements are remembered, but more vivid still are memories of Elizabeth the person. She took her duties seriously, and she took the concerns of others seriously. But she never took herself seriously. She enjoyed life with gusto. Those beautiful eyes always hinted at a mixture of mischief and shyness; a smile always seemed to play around her lips; and the Scottish lilt in her voice, undimmed by decades abroad, was unforgettable. In the end the most important parts of her survive: generosity, kindness and curiosity.
