Headed by Trevor Stack (Spanish and Latin American Studies, Anthropology), CISRUL’s membership reaches across 8 disciplines to house a vibrant, diverse debate about the political concepts which underpin our modern world. It brings to bear expertise in anthropology, education, history, law, philosophy, politics, sociology and theology.

Together with the CISRUL members, PhDs and alumni listed below, other CISRUL associates are listed as PhD supervisors.

CISRUL – Who we are

Professor Trevor Stack
CISRUL Director

Trevor Stack is an anthropologist who teaches in Hispanic Studies and is working on citizenship. He has published Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (2012), and is lead editor of the CISRUL volume Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (2015). His articles include Beyond the State? Civil sociality and other notions of citizenship and In the eyes of the law, in the eyes of society: a citizenship tradition in west Mexico.

Professor Michael Brown
Irish, Scottish and Enlightenment History

Michael Brown is a historian of Ireland, Scotland and Britain more widely, with particular interest in the Enlightenment and the political culture of the eighteenth century.

Professor Nadia Kiwan
French and Francophone Cultures and Societies

Nadia Kiwan is Senior Lecturer in Francophone Studies. With a dual academic training in Francophone Studies and Sociology, Dr Kiwan’s research interests are focused on intersectional approaches to questions of migration, nationality, secularism and citizenship. Her latest monograph Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France was published in 2019.

Professor Tamas Gyorfi
Legal Theory and Comparative Constitutional Law

Tamas Gyorfi (CISRUL Deputy) has published articles on the different conceptions of the Rule of Law and the virtues of rule-based decision-making which is arguably central to the idea of the Rule of Law. He is also interested in how different constitutions and political theories conceptualise and interpret the concept of constituent power and the membership in a political community. He is a member of the Legal Theory Research Group.

Dr Rachel Shanks
Education

Dr Shanks has worked in higher education, community education, the trade union movement and the voluntary sector. She has worked as a law lecturer, and in the University of Aberdeen’s former Centre for Lifelong Learning. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Education.

Professor Karin Friedrich
Early Modern History
Professor Andrea Teti
Democracy, Democratization and Democracy-promotion
Professor Pamela Abbott
Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research
Professor Matyas Bodig
Legal Theory and Human Rights
Professor Brian Brock
Moral and Practical Theology
Professor Robert Frost
Eastern European and Scandinavian History
Dr Michael Laffin
Early Modern Political Theology
Professor Beth Lord
Early Modern Political Thought
Dr Denisse Román-Burgos
Social Anthropology
Dr Ritu Vij
Social Policy and International Political Economy
Professor Claire Wallace
Digital Economy
Professor Thomas Weber
History and International Affairs
Dr Hanifi Bariş
Leverhulme Fellow
Edward Thornton
Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History
Our PhD students represent a variety of disciplines, including sociology, law, race studies, international security studies, and history. Browse their individual profiles to learn more about their backgrounds, projects, and unique interdisciplinary contributions to CISRUL.
Elise Marie Boyle Espinosa
Politico

Elise was hired in our second call in September 2019. She has an interdisciplinary background in international studies and global development.

Her PhD project examines the education system of Islamic State, and the impact that living under Islamic State control has had on education more broadly. This project is supervised by Professor Pamela Abbott and Dr Rachel Shanks.

 

 

Valentin Clavé-Mercier
Politico

Valentin was hired in the first call in October 2018 and holds a B.A. in Political Studies and a M.A in Political Analysis from the Unirsidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)

His PhD project, supervised by Dr Trevor Stack and Dr Ritu Vij, is focused on the concept of sovereignty and more exactly on the use, mobilisation and materialisation of this notion by Maori people in New Zealand.

Anna Sophie Lauwers
Politico

Sophie was hired in the first call in October 2018,  she completed her Research Master Political Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where she wrote a thesis on Islamophobia and racism.

Her PhD project is supervised by Dr. Brian BrockProfessor Nadia Kiwan ,and Dr. Tamas Gyorfi and investigates to which extent political secularism in Europe is still influenced by its Christian past, and whether a potential Christian bias has (problematic) consequences for certain groups in European society.

Daniel Matthews-Ferrero
Politico

Daniel was hired in the first call in October 2018, is a European Studies graduate (BA from the University of Kent, UK; MA from the College of Europe, Poland).

He is working on his PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Claire WallaceProf. Tom Weber, and Dr. Natasha Danilova, investigating the growth of populist movements in Western Europe and beyond as a reaction against liberal overreach at the “end of history”.

Jorg Meurkes
Politico

Jorg was hired in our second call in September 2019. His Phd project will investigate to what extent contemporary Spinozist and Nietzschean inspired conceptions of politics are at odds with Liberal-Kantian ones, and whether the former can be linked to a recent boom in speculative or ontological (i.e. anti-transcendental) philosophies. He will be supervised by Dr Beth Lord and Dr Ritu Vij.

Aditya Mohanty
CISRUL

Since 2012 Aditya has worked as an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Central University of South Bihar, Gaya, India. His PhD research project falls within the interstices of Urban Studies and Post-colonial/ South Asian studies. It aims to explore a) the tractions that new urban politics exerts on the subaltern groups and b) how that in turn recasts the contours of identity politics and processes of contentious politics.

Stephan Ritscher
Politico

Stephan was hired in the first call in October 2018 and studies political philosophy with a focus on the concept of the Political. His PhD dissertation, supervised by Dr. Ritu Vij and Dr. Tamas Gyorfi, seeks to investigate the interdependencies between democracy and populism and how populists challenge the status quo by advocating a counter-hegemonic understanding of the people.

Maxim van Asseldonk
Politico

Maxim was hired in our second call in September 2019. His project at POLITICO investigates what role the concept of political community may play in philosophical theories of civil disobedience, particularly in contentious circumstances such as post-conflict societies. He is supervised by Dr Beth Lord and Dr Trevor Stack.

Fredericke Weiner
Politico

Fredericke was hired in our second call in September 2019. Her PhD research, supervised by Dr. Ritu Vij and Dr. Nadia Kiwan, she is investigating the Utopian potential of the Global Women’s March Movement. She studies the movement’s global interconnectedness as well as the concrete local activism to understand these glocalized processes. She is supervised by Dr. Nadia Kiwan and Dr Ritu Vij

Marie Wuth
Politico

Marie was hired in the first call in October 2018. Her interests include political and social philosophy as well as affect theory and French theory.

Her PhD project takes a feminist-political stance on Spinoza’s relational ontology and epistemology in order to develop an affect theoretical account of political agency and political bodies building on and informed by Foucault, Deleuze, and Butler, supervised by  Dr Beth Lord and Dr Andrea Teti.

Andreas Zaunseder
CISRUL

Interests: Historical, Political and Economic Sociology, Political Theory, Critical Theory, Alternative Economies, Cryptomarkets

Dr Hanifi Bariş
Leverhulme Fellow
Dr Domenico Carolei
Dr Alexander Crawford
Dr Dikaia Gavala
Dr Anna Grudzinska
Dr Saerom Han
Dr Eve Hayes de Kalaf
School of Advanced Study, University of London
Dr James King
Dr Bisrat Lemessa-Kabeta
Dr Rose Luminiello
Dr Augustinus Mohn
Dr Joel Pierce
Dr Chuck Sturtevant
Dr Marek Szilvasi
Dr Ulisses Terto Neto
Dr Alena Thiel

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