CISRUL PhDs are supervised by interdisciplinary teams of 2 or 3 supervisors. They typically include the CISRUL members listed below, but may also include other staff from these Schools:

You are encouraged to contact possible supervisors before you apply.

Professor Pamela Abbott

is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Centre for Global Development. Her main research interests are in the sociology of gender, quality of life and social quality, and social, economic and political transformations. She has carried out research in the UK, the European Union, the former Soviet Union, East Africa and the Middle East and North Africa.

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Dr Eliza Bechtold

is a Lecturer in Law specialising in public law and human rights. Her research interests include freedom of expression, in particular the regulation of extreme speech in Europe and the United States, comparative constitutional law, and international human rights law.

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Professor Eleonora Belfiore

is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity. She has published extensively on cultural politics and policy, and particularly the place that notions of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts have had in British cultural policy discourses. She edits the Palgrave book series New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, which has published 16 volumes to date, and she is Co-Editor in Chief journal Cultural Trends.

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Professor Brian Brock

holds a personal Chair in Moral and Practical Theology. He is the author of Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ; Christian Ethics in a Technological Age; and Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture.

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Professor 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. He is the Co-Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies.

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Dr Erin Ferguson

is a Lecturer in Law specialising in public law and human rights. Her research interests include privatisation and its impact on public law, freedom of information, and participatory democracy.

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Professor Karin Friedrich

is Chair in Early Modern History. She has widely published on the history of Poland-Lithuania, Prussia, court culture, history of religion and political ideas. She welcomes supervision of topics in the social, political, cultural and intellectual history of Central Europe (esp. Brandenburg-Prussia, Poland-Lithuania and the Holy Roman Empire) from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, and the early modern/modern history of East Central Europe’s borderlands.

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Professor Tamas Gyorfi

holds a Chair in Law. He is interested in supervising research students working in the following areas: Legal Theory (especially legal reasoning and the normativity of law), Public Law, Comparative Constitutional Law (especially constitutional judicial review, popular sovereignty), Human Rights (especially freedom of religion).

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Professor Nadia Kiwan

holds a Chair in French and Francophone Studies. Her research interests focus on contemporary French and Francophone cultures and societies. She is particularly interested in public discourses about postcolonial migration, secularism and Islam as well as decolonial and intersectional social movements.

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Dr Michael Laffin

is a Lecturer in Divinity. His research focuses on ethics and political theology. He has recently published a book on the political theology of Martin Luther. Additional research interests include Augustine’s political thought and Augustinianism, genealogical critique in ethical inquiry, and the history of political philosophy (especially ancient and early modern).

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Dr Helen Lynch

is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Creative Writing. As well as the literature and politics of the early modern period (especially Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare and the connections between them), she is interested in polemic, rhetoric, genre and gender in the seventeenth century, and in renaissance classical reception. Her monograph Milton and the Politics of Public Speech (2015) focused on the political prose of Milton and his contemporaries, using Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to illuminate seventeenth-century oratorical discourse.

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Professor Beth Lord

is Chair in Philosophy. Her research interests are mainly in early modern and modern metaphysics and political philosophy, especially Spinoza, Kant, German Idealism, and Deleuze. She is the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze and Spinoza’s Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide.

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Dr Elham Moonesirust

is a Lecturer in Business Management. Her research interests centre on issues of identity and subjectivity; power, science and technology studies, critical management studies, gender studies, and qualitative methodologies.

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Dr Piotr Niewiadomski

is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen and the Director of a new, innovative programme MSc Sustainability Transitions. Piotr is an economic geographer interested in the global development of the tourism sector, economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts of tourism, sustainability transitions in tourism and the political economy of sustainable tourism. He is an Associate Editor of Tourism Geographies – An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment.

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Dr Rachel Shanks

has worked in higher education, community education, and the voluntary and trade union sectors. In higher education, she has been a law lecturer and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Education. Research interests include professional learning and mentoring, and children and young people’s rights.

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Professor Trevor Stack

holds a Chair in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and is Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law. He is an anthropologist of citizenship and civil society, and has conducted research mainly in Mexico.

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Dr Andrea Teti

is Senior Lecturer in International Relations. His research focuses on the politics of democracy promotion in the Euro-Mediterranean region, and several related areas spanning the history and theory of social science. He has published on democratization, Egyptian politics, knowledge production in Social Science, and political theory.

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Dr Ritu Vij

is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Her recent publications include the co-authored book Precarity and International Relations (Palgrave, 2020).

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Professor Claire Wallace

holds a Chair in Sociology. She spent many years working on transitions in Eastern Europe including projects on health in the former Soviet Union, national, regional and European identity as well as work, family and care across Europe.  More recently, she was a co-investigator at the Rural Digital Economy Hub (dot.rural) aimed at transforming rural areas in the UK using digital technology.  At present, she is a Principal Investigator on a Horizon 2020 Project about Cultural Tourism, and a partner of the ESRC Research Centre DIGIT, focused on digital working.

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Professor Thomas Weber

holds a Chair in History and International Affairs, and he is the founding Director of the Centre of Global Security and Governance. His research and teaching expertise lie in European, international, and global political history.

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Professor Adelyn Wilson

holds a Chair in Law. She is interested in Scottish and European early-modern legal history, medical law (especially abortion law), and UK constitutional law.

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