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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Dr Maggie Bolton

is a Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Science.  Her main research interests are human-animal relations, new materialities, science and technology studies and Indigenous social movements.  She has carried out research in the Andes region of South America.  She has co-edited the volumes Animals and Science: From Colonial Encounters to the Biotech Industry (CSP 2010) and Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes and Arctic (Brill, forthcoming 2023).

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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 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 of Spinoza’s Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide.

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Dr Fransiska Louwagie

is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. Her research combines interests in memory and genocide studies with literary studies (in French and comparative literatures), comics studies and translation studies. She works on political cartoons, graphic novels, multilingual literature and testimony, with a focus on questions of human rights and citizenship. She has a keen interest in Knowledge Exchange and has worked with community and tertiary partners in Belgium, the UK, France, Canada, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa and Ivory Coast.

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Dr Samantha May

is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations. Broadly, her research interest lies in the intersections between religion, politics and economics. Interests lay in understanding alternative conceptions of territory, sovereignty, community, moral economies and social integration. Dr May is author of Islamic Charity: How Charitable Giving Became Seen as a Threat to National Security (2021) Zed Books.

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Dr Martin Mills

is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. He specialises in the comparative organisation and structure of governance in religious, state and medical institutions.

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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 Clare Frances Moran

is a Lecturer in Law, specialising in international criminal law. Clare Frances’ research interests lie in the related areas of international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law, and she has published widely in these areas. Her first monograph, ‘The Authority of International Criminal Law: A Controversial Concept’, is published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. Her work has also engaged with the role of defences in both domestic and the international criminal legal systems, the role of the International Criminal Court in prosecuting human trafficking, and the way in which international criminal law and human rights law can be used to support the rights of refugees.

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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 Joseph Pierce

is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geosciences. Trained as an urban geographer, his research interests revolve around place-making, urban politics, housing/development, sustainability, and the relationships between automation and urban landscapes.

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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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Dr. Digdem Soyaltin Colella

is a Lecturer in Politics. Her research focuses on the politics of corruption, mechanisms of state capture, autocratic bureaucracies & illiberal governance, and Southeast European and Turkish politics. Her publications appeared in peer-reviewed international journals. She is also the author of EU Good Governance Promotion in the Age of Democratic Decline (ed, Palgrave, 2022) and Europeanisation, Corruption and Good Governance in the Public Sector: The Case of Turkey (Routledge, 2017). Her more recent research concentrates on local environmental protests and art-based anti-corruption movements in authoritarian states and rule of law crisis in the EU.

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Professor Trevor Stack

holds a Chair in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and 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. He has published Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (U New Mexico, 2012), and edited the volumes Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2015), Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (CUP, 2020), Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021), and Citizens Against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico (U Rutgers, 2022).

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Dr Ritu Vij

is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Her interests include social theory, international political economy, social policy and civil society, and affect and political subjectivity. Her recent publications include the co-authored book Precarity and International Relations (Palgrave, 2020).

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Dr Calum Waddell

is a Lecturer in Film. His publications include The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film, 1959-1977 (2018) and Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa (2021). His documentary on this latter topic won the Best Film Award at the Derby Film Festival in 2018. He is interested in supervising PhDs in film and film culture, especially in Southern Africa.

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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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Dr Owen Walsh

is a Lecturer in History with a focus on the twentieth century. Thematically, his work focuses on race, radicalism, and globality. His area specialism is in the US.

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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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