About me
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I am Professor of Political Sociology and Director of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
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I studied German and Russian at Heriot-Watt University (BA) and International Relations at the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and at the London School of Economics (PhD). I arrived at UCL in 2003 as an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and was appointed to a Lectureship in the Politics of Central Europe in 2004. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology in 2010 and Professor of Political Sociology in 2019. You can watch my inaugural professorial lecture here.
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My research focuses the interplay between identity and power, with particular reference to nationalism, populism, sexualities and migration. I am particularly interested in the ways that powerful social and political actors discursively construct identities to create in-groups/out-groups and social and moral hierarchies in a bid to legitimise certain actors, groups and beliefs and delegitimise others.
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My research is explicitly interdisciplinary, crossing the boundaries of Sociology, International Relations, Social Psychology and Socio-Linguistics. I have a strong theoretical interest in discourse - particularly, the post-structuralist discourse theories of Laclau and Mouffe - and a regional interest in Russia, Poland and Germany and increasingly in Brazil and other Latin American societies.
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From 2018-22 I was Principal Investigator of the Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Innovative Training Network 'Delayed Transformational Fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the Rise of Populism' and from 2019-23 I was Director of Research of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme 'Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe: neo-traditionalism and neofeudalism’. For more information about these projects, visit the Populism in Central and Eastern Europe website.
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I am a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, a recipient of a UCL Provost's Teaching Award for excellence in teaching and a UKCGE [UK Council for Graduate Education] Recognised Research Supervisor.
