Areas of supervision

The following are some of the areas in which we would welcome enquiries from suitably-qualified applicants. 

Students should approach the Director, Vassiliki Kolocotroni with a research proposal of 1000 words and a short cv.

  • Politics: Comparative politics of radical left parties post-1989, particularly their organizational, strategic and programmatic transformation; the politics of protest in Southern Europe; the European politics of the financial crisis (Myrto Tsakatika); politics of Latin America, including conflict and violence, gender and feminist politics and development (Mo Hume); Yugoslav and Balkan history, Communism, international history of the Cold War, the European Left, uneven and combined development, nationalism and federalism (Vladimir Unkovski-Korica)
  • History: Women’s and gender history, European communism, political and social mobilisation around ‘1968’, collective memory of World War Two (Maud Bracke); Russian/Soviet military and political history, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Afghanistan, Counter-Insurgency and Revolutionary War, Drug smuggling and Marxist political economy (Alexander Marshall).
  • Human Geography: Political geographies of globalization, subaltern political ecologies and the formation of transnational solidarity networks (Dave Featherstone); urban environments, radical politics and public spaces (Lazaros Karaliotas)
  • Sociology: Racism and ethnicity, class and stratification, collective action (Satnam Virdee). Robert Gibb supervises Ph.D students on contemporary French social theory, collective action and social movements. Andy Smith offers supervision of students interested in working on critical examinations of the politics of culture – film, literature, sport – from a materialist perspective; issues around racism and anti-racism; imperialism, especially the British empire and its aftermath. 
  • Literature: Writing of/on the Spanish Civil War; colonialism; culture and identity; Renaissance literature (Willy Maley); feminism and socialism, poetry and the avant-garde (Jane Goldman); critical theory, countercultures, modernism and the international avant-garde, surrealism, feminism, film (Vassiliki Kolocotroni); Romantic radicalism; Habermas and the public sphere; ecology (Alex Benchimol); technology and the humanities; Scottish and Irish studies; narratives of capitalism (Maria-Daniella Dick); 19th- and 20th-century German literature and politics (Ernest Schonfield)
  • Theatre, Film and TV Studies: Simon Murray offers supervision of students in theatre, contemporary performance and Marxist aesthetics and principles.