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European Centre @ POLIS

Department of Politics and International Studies
 

 

Steering Committee

 

 

Dr Geoffrey  Edwards

Geoffrey Edwards

Geoffrey Edwards is Senior Fellow in the Department and Emeritus Reader in European Studies. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has held research posts at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a number of other institutions including the Federal Trust and Chatham House. He specialises in the European Union, its institutions and its foreign and security policies.

 

Dr Mette  Eilstrup- Sangiovanni

Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni

Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni is Reader in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Her research focuses on International Organization and International Security, including the European Union and its Common Security and Defence Policy, as well as the role of non-state actors in global governance. Along with her wider work on international organization, she has published widely on issues related to European integration, including articles in leading international journals on the historical genesis of European integration, integration theory, European defence cooperation and the external bordering of the EU.

Her most recent work on the weakness of the EU’s external borders is forthcoming in the Journal of European Public Policy.

 

Dr Julie  Smith

Julie Smith

Dr Julie Smith (Baroness Smith of Newnham) is a Fellow in Politics and Graduate Tutor at Robinson College, Cambridge, and was Director of the European Centre in the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University from 2013 to 2019. Since 2016 she has been Co-Director of the MSt in International Relations, the two-year part-time Masters programme co-organised by POLIS and the University’s Institute for Continuing Education.  

Julie read PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford, and took both her MPhil and DPhil in Politics at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She was a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and prior to coming to the Centre of International Studies in Cambridge in 1997, Julie taught in the International Relations and European Studies Department of the Central European University in Budapest.

An expert in European politics, Julie was Head of the European Programme at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) from 1999 until 2003. She has been a member of the House of Lords since 2014 and a member of the Lords’ International Relations Committee since 2016.

 

Dr Pieter  van Houten

Pieter Van Houten

 

Pieter van Houten is Lecturer in the POLIS department, where he teaches comparative politics, European politics and research methods. His research interests focus primarily on territorial politics (especially regional autonomy movements and regional parties) and state development in Western Europe, as well as post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans. He currently directs the YouGov-Cambridge Programme in Public Opinion Research. He has a PhD and MA from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree from the University of Amsterdam.

Post-graduate supervision interests

Comparative politics, ideally with a focus on Europe and on topics related to territorial politics (federalism, decentralisation, regional autonomy movements, secessionism) and state-building and development; applications of rational choice and game theory, quantitative methods.

 


 

Associated members

 

 

Barry Colfer

Barry Colfer is a junior research fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Barry’s research interests include the politics of European integration, the future of work and the trade union movement, and the consequences of Brexit for Ireland. Barry holds a PhD from Cambridge and is co-convener of the Cambridge seminar on the future of the island of Ireland. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Oxford, Harvard and at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and worked previously at both the Irish and European Parliaments.

 

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Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Cambridge and a Senior Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna. He is currently working on the foreign policy dimensions of Europe’s migration dilemmas, while also preparing (with Michael Smith and Sophie Vanhoonacker) a fourth edition of International Relations and the European Union. He is joint editor, with Christian Lequesne of Sciences Po, Paris, of the European Review of International Studies.

 

 


 

PhD students

 

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Hanna Corsini

Hanna’s current PhD research project focuses on the connection between populism and world politics and aims to understand how this phenomenon influences foreign policies of national governments. She is currently analysing four case studies in the European context, namely Austria, Italy, France, and Hungary. In more general terms, her goal is to create an interdisciplinary dialogue linking International Relations and comparative politics. Prior to her PhD studies in Cambridge, she graduated from the University of Vienna (BA in Political Science) and Sciences Po Paris (MA International Economic Policy). In her free time, she likes to read (mostly French literature), go to the theatre and listen to some jazz or classical music. 

 

 

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Julien Dumont

Julien's research examines contemporary evolutions in party democracy, in both France and the United Kingdom. He is particularly interested in the displacement of the left-right divide as the central axis, or logic, of political competition, and looks at the emergence of alternative axes building on themes of populism and technocracy. 

 

 

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Ugur Tekiner

Uğur is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Before studying at Cambridge, he received an MSc in European Studies from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. His current research focuses on the ranging impact of the European integration process on the political crisis of the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Spanning from the mid-1980s until 2016, this research seeks to comparatively examine how European integration influenced the political fortunes of Labour and the SPD, based on the party politics, policy-making and ideological dimensions. His research interests are European integration, political parties, British politics, German politics and Turkish politics. 

 

 

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Eva Krejcova

Eva Krejcova is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on political attitudes, voting behaviour and migration in Europe. She uses quantitative research methods and supervises the “Statistics and Methods in Politics and International Relations” module at POLIS. Before coming to Cambridge, she was a Research Fellow at Princeton University as part of the Princeton-Sciences Po EUROGLOB Project during summer 2018 and a Research Assistant at CEE, Sciences Po Paris, during autumn 2018. Eva obtained her master’s in Comparative Politics (cum laude) from Sciences Po Paris in 2019.

 

 

Jose Piquer

José Piquer is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge (UK). Previously, he has worked as Executive Director in the School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University and conducted research at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). His research interests span the disciplines of political science, political economy and European studies. His current research project studies the relationship between the macroeconomic changes following the 2008 crisis with issues of political transformation in Europe, with a special focus on the political economies of the United Kingdom and Spain. His writings have appeared in English and Spanish media such as The New Statesman, The Monkey Cage (The Washington Post), Política Exterior and Expansión.  

 

 

 

Tobias Crèmer

 

Jakob

 

Chiara