Lorraine Grimes is a historian whose research focuses on social history, gender, and welfare institutions in twentieth century Ireland and Britain. Her work examines the experiences of women, family structures, and the social policies that shaped responses to pregnancy and motherhood outside marriage. Grimes studies the role of migration, religious institutions, and state welfare systems in shaping the lives of single mothers. She is the author of Single Mothers in Twentieth Century Ireland and Britain: Pregnancy, Migration and Institutionalization, published by Bloomsbury in 2025, which analyzes how unmarried mothers were managed through social, religious, and institutional frameworks across the twentieth century.