SPAIS staff supervisory interests

Academic staff in SPAIS are particularly interested in supervising in the following research areas:

Professor Bridget Anderson

Critical migration studies; mobility; citizenship; domestic labour; immigration enforcement.

Marxist and decolonial International Relations theory; indigenous peoples' issues in global politics; Arctic geopolitics, environmental and indigenous peoples’ issues; indigenous peoples’ nationalism and self-determination.

Dr Sam Appleton

Global political economy; Global governance; Practices and politics of development finance; Multilateral financial institutions; Managerialism and neoliberalism

Dr Will Atkinson

Social class in relation to educational inequalities, employment, culture, politics, identities and everyday life; Bourdieu, field theory and phenomenology. I’m usually keener to supervise a thesis that uses Bourdieu but has little to do with class than a thesis on class that has little to do with Bourdieu.

Dr Roddy Brett

Political violence, Genocide, Transitional justice, Reconciliation, Peace processes/negotiations, Peacebuilding, including local level peacebuilding, Regional interest in particular in Latin America (including Colombia and Central America)

Professor Terrell Carver

Marx; Engels; Marxism; philosophy and methodology of the social sciences; Sex, gender, sexuality; masculinities and international politics.

Dr Egle Cesnulyte

Gender in African politics (especially Kenya and East Africa); feminist political economy of everyday life; gender in informal and social reproductive work; sex work; gender and development, especially critical approaches to development; neoliberalism.

Dr Katharine Charsley

Marriage-related migration; gender and migration (including masculinity); other issues in migration, ethnicity, transnationalism & diaspora; British South Asians (particularly Pakistanis) and other South Asian diasporas; kinship; qualitative methods.

Dr Ryerson Christie

Peacebuilding; disaster studies (focusing on vulnerabilities and capacities); civil society / state interaction in post-conflict states; human security.

Dr Rebecca Coleman

Digital media and culture, temporality (futures and presents), bodies, affect and new materialisms, interdisciplinary methodologies, feminist theory.

Dr Lucas de Abreu Maia

US politics and government; public opinion; mass political behaviour; ideology in mass publics; quantitative methods; Latin American politics.

Dr Alix Dietzel

Applying political theory (preferably global justice theory) to global problems including but not limited to climate change; city level governance of climate change; global governance of climate change; critical approaches to global justice theories including but not limited to post-colonial critiques; just transition and climate change; democratic decision making around climate change; inclusion and exclusion in just transitions; adapting to climate change in cities.

Dr Filippo Dionigi

Forced displacement in the Middle East; Islamist movements; international relations theory applied to the analysis of Middle Eastern affairs; natural language processing and text-mining methodologies applied to international relations.

Dr Ashley Dodsworth

Political theory (especially environmental political thought; feminist political thought; history of political thought); human rights; climate change.

Dr John Downer

Science and Technology Studies (STS); Sociology of knowledge and expertise; Sociology of technological risk and disaster; Organizational sociology. (Especially as these apply to: regulation; bureaucracy; nuclear energy and weapons; civil aviation; rockets; critical infrastructures; AI & autonomous systems).

Professor Tim Edmunds

Maritime security, security sector reform, capacity building.

Dr Magnus Feldmann

Comparative and international political economy (esp. institutions and varieties of capitalism); Comparative politics and public policy; Central and Eastern Europe

Dr Adrian Flint

HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa; EU development policy; EU-ACP relations; regionalism; sustainable development.

Dr Jonathan Floyd

The nature of political theory/philosophy; the relationship between political theory and political practice (via e.g. the ideal/nonideal-theory debate, the facts/principles debate, or the moralism/realism debate); the relationship between political theory and political science; the relationship between political theory and history; general problems of justification and methodology (including e.g. constructivism, contextualism, and coherentism and reflective equilibrium).

Dr Gaston Fornes

Development of small and mid-sized firms in developing countries; relations between China and other developing countries (in particular Latin American); management in developing countries.

Dr Tim Fowler

Contemporary liberal theories of social justice, especially with respect to education and family policy, and issues of religious and ethical diversity.

Dr Jon Fox

Nationalism; ethnicity; migration; everyday nationhood; integration; racialisation; East Europe; East European migration

Professor Roberta Guerrina

Gendered impact of Brexit; Feminist Foreign Policy; EU gender politics and policies; Feminist security studies and the Women, peace and security agenda; Institutional approaches to equality, diversity and inclusion.

Professor Susan Halford

Digital data and methods; digital inequality; digital futures; interdisciplinary collaboration; participatory methods and co-production.

Dr Jo Haynes

Popular music; race/racialisation especially in popular music/culture & media; sociology of culture; creative labour; cultural entrepreneurship; festivals; sociological methods

Professor Eric Herring

I supervise PhD research on diverse world politics topics (e.g. state terrorism, the arms trade, US foreign policy, the news media, propaganda, neoliberal globalization, strategic nonviolent struggle, refugees, the global movement against sexual harassment of women in public, alternatives to the war on drugs), using many kinds of method and drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives. The primary motivation should be to make a critical scholarly contribution to helping make positive change happen. I have supervised 16 PhDs, and these have been published as numerous excellent books and journal articles. I am particularly interested in supervising PhDs on any part of the world relating to climate change (including climate action, climate communication and climate justice), inclusive development and adaptive development. I have a particular but not exclusive interest in Somalia/Somaliland. I am keen to supervise interdisciplinary PhDs, whether with the sciences or the arts or across the social sciences. I am happy to provide detailed, prompt and constructive feedback on PhD proposals and to work with potential applicants to refine them.

Dr Kuba Jablonowski

Critical data studies; Critical border studies; Digital identity; Migration governance; Bureaucracies, institutions, and social movements; Surveillance and documentation studies; Digital methods; Engaged research; Novel strategies for information disclosure.

Dr Nazia Hussein

I am interested in supervising PhD students and postdoctoral scholars studying gender, race, religion and culture using postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks. These approaches can be applied to a range of inequality studies: e.g. Muslim, Black and minority communities in the UK or Third World countries, particularly South Asia. I am also interested in media representations of women, particularly minority women’s representation in the media. My current research projects look at decolonial thought and its application in studies of inequality.

Professor Jonathan Joseph

International Relations theory, social theory, philosophy of social science, Marxism and critical theory, poststructuralism, new approaches to International Relations, the concepts of hegemony and governmentality. Global governance, peacebuilding, resilience.

Dr Ana Juncos Garcia

Peacebuilding; conflict resolution; resilience; security sector reform, and human rights; European Union politics, including EU foreign and security policy, Europeanisation and EU enlargement (Western Balkans); institutionalist theories; elite socialisation

Dr Saffron Karlsen

Ethnicity, religion, racialisation, health, social inequality and exclusion, social identity and group awareness, quantitative and mixed methods research.

Dr Winnie King

East Asian political economy; economic development in East Asia; Policy making; state/non-state actor relations; Civil society; Chinese politics and international relations; Sino-EU relations; Sino-UK relations; Taiwan politics.

Dr Raphael Lefevre

Political violence; Civil wars; Politics of armed groups; Organized crime; Middle East politics; Sunni and Shia Islamist movements

Dr Lee Marshall

Popular music; sociology of art and culture; media and popular culture, especially audiences and fan cultures; stardom and celebrity; authorship, copyright and piracy; cultural and creative industries, including creative labour; the music industry.

Dr Neil Matthews

British party politics; party organisation; intra-party democracy; the politics of Northern Ireland; consociational power-sharing.

Dr Peace Medie

Feminist international relations, gender and politics in Africa, violence against women, post-conflict peacebuilding.

Dr Torsten Michel

Political, legal and ethical dimensions of genocide and political violence; dehumanisation in and after violent conflict; trust and fear in world politics; critical security studies; international relations theory; interpretivism and continental philosophy in international relations.

Dr Sveta Milyaeva

The sociology of science and technology, economic sociology - especially the social studies of finance and social studies of markets, digital economy, digital personal data and data privacy, and marketisation of higher education.

Professor Tariq Modood

Theory and politics of multiculturalism and secularism; ethnic identities, national identities and the 'second generation'; ethnic disadvantage and progress in employment and education; comparisons within and between Western Europe and North America; the politics of being Muslim in the West and Islamophobia.

Dr Marcus Morgan

I’m especially interested in supervising doctoral projects on the role of culture, performance, narrative, iconicity, and symbolism in politics and political change. I’m also interested in: social theory; cultural sociology; social movements; theories of power; humanism and/in the social sciences; cultural theory; philosophy of the social sciences; the role of ideas in social change; apartheid South Africa

Dr Michael Naughton

Criminal justice, with a specialist interest in miscarriages of justice; the application of the zemiological perspective; Foucault, Goffman and Bauman.

Dr Rosie Nelson

Trans, non binary, LGBTQIA+, bisexuality, kink, BDSM, polyamory, ‘non-traditional’ sexual and/or romantic relationships, gender theory, queer theory, intersectionality, qualitative methods, media, health, sex work

Jack Nicholls

Deliberative democracy: theory and application; Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory; Climate change politics; Social/political dimensions of the net zero transition; Local climate action; Intergovernmental climate negotiations as part of the UNFCCC; Environmental discourse and sociology.

Professor Julia O'Connell Davidson

Slavery, 'modern slavery', the afterlife of racial slavery; trafficking, smuggling, labour migration, debt and migration; childhood, especially children and migration, labour or sexuality; sex work; domestic work.

Dr Jessica Ogden

Digital culture; Science and Technology Studies (STS); Sociology of knowledge; Hackers and hacker cultures; Web/internet futures; Infrastructure studies; Web archives and memory work; Digital/data activism; Digital methods innovation and participatory methods.

Dr Sam Okyere

I am interested in supervising PhD studies focused on childhood and child rights, migration, mobility, human trafficking, sex work/prostitution, ‘modern slavery', child and adult labour in artisanal mining, fishing, agriculture and other sectors. I am also interested in PhDs focused on the interplay between human and child rights, power, class, ethnicity, inequality, legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, neoliberalism and globalisation. I am especially (but not exclusively) keen on proposals that aim to examine these topics and themes in Africa.

Professor Tom Osborne

Social and political theory; language, discourse and society; the epistemology of the social sciences; vitalism, the brain and neurobiology; Henri Bergson, William James and Gilles Deleuze; Michel Foucault; theories of power, coercion and authority; populism and illiberalism; expertise and the professions; the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas

Professor Therese O’Toole

Participatory and urban governance; social movement activism, political participation and mobilisation among young people and minority ethnic and religious groups; Muslim engagement in governance.

Dr Jessica Paddock

I am broadly interested in supervising students with interests in consumption, environment and sustainability, and food.

Dr Hannah Parrot

The politics of (un)sustainability (ecological, social, political and economic); utopian theory and praxis; utopia/dystopia and popular culture; prefigurative politics; green citizenship; intentional communities; nature connection and awareness; the politics of degrowth.

Dr Columba Peoples

Critical security studies; critical theories of technology and international relations; nuclear security; space security; planetary (in)security.

Dr Nieves Perez-Solorzano

European Union politics (including Europeanisation, European Union enlargement, and European Union and civil society participation); democracy, representation and civil society; interest politics and lobbying; lobbying regulation; democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe.

Dr Maud Perrier

Feminist theories and feminist movements in Europe/NorthAmerica; especially social reproduction and Marxist feminism. The intersections of gender and class in relation to neoliberalism, childcare; motherhood; food work; emotions.

Dr Mircea Popa

Comparative and international political economy, corruption, financial/economic crises, formal theory, quantitative methods.

Dr Katharina Richter

Environmental politics (especially degrowth and other socio-ecological transformation projects); Rights of Nature and the cultural politics of sustainability transitions; Environmental justice between Global North and South (e.g. relating to decarbonisation strategies in the Global North: net zero, lithium extraction, etc.); Latin American social movements and indigenous rights; Decolonial theory and praxis; Extractivism and postextractivism in Latin America

Dr Chris Rossdale

Social movements, solidarity politics, political resistance, direct action, civil disobedience. Critical military studies, militarism and anti-militarism, state violence, arms trade. Critical international theory – especially using feminist/postcolonial/critical race/queer/anarchist approaches.

Dr Thomas Sealy

Multiculturalism; secularism; religious diversity; ethnicity; religion and politics; religious conversion; conversion to Islam; racialisation.

Dr Elena Stavrevska

Feminist political economy and conflict-affected societies; Intersectionality and peacebuilding; Decolonial and feminist approaches to peace; Gender politics and policies in the Balkans; Women, Peace and Security; feminisms and/in the Global East; Coloniality of knowledge

Professor Paula Sur ridge

Social and Political Attitudes, Public Opinion and Voting Behaviour, especially but not exclusively quantitative approaches. Also social identities (particularly class and nationalism)

Dr Leonidas Tsilipakos

Social theory; methodology, philosophy and history of the social sciences; Michel Foucault; Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy

Dr Karen Tucker

Indigenous knowledge; indigenous politics; global governance and global governmentalities; post-colonialism and de-colonialism; global governance; Latin America, NGOs; ethnography; indigenous knowledges; reproductive politics; reforestation.

Dr Elspeth Van Veeren

Secrecy studies and security; US military and security practices; US foreign policy and identity (esp. gender and race); US politics and democracy; the war on terror; critical security studies; visual politics; art, cultural studies and security; science and technology studies and security; continental philosophy in politics and international relations; critical methodologies.

Professor Jutta Weldes

Popular culture and world politics; feminisms, gender and world politics; critical international relations theories; the discourse/ideology of US foreign policy; discourse analysis and interpretive methods

Dr Jennifer Whillans

I am interested in the temporal organisation, understanding, and experience of mundane practices in daily life, especially – but not limited to – eating (at home, at work, in restaurants), employment, and sleep. Interests include: Time; Timing; Mundane practices; Eating; Paid work; Routines; Rhythms; Synchronization; Coordination; Schedules; Theories of practice; Domestic division of labour; Social change; Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods