About me
I am Professor of Political Sociology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
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.
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.
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.
From 2018-22 I was Principal Investigator of the Marie Skłodowska-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.
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.
