School of Social & Political Sciences

We are delighted to welcome Ewan Gibbs  who joins us as a Lecturer in Global Inequalities within the Economic and Social History subject area. Previously, Ewan completed a PhD in Economic and Social History, studying the long-term effects of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. Ewan went on to lecture in social science at the University of the West of Scotland where he developed research projects related to foreign direct investment and industrial heritage. He has published journal articles on working-class politics and protest, the memorialisation of industrial employment and labour market adaption in areas which experienced major industrial closures. Ewan’s monograph, Coal Country: the meaning and memory of deindustrialization in postwar Scotland, will be published by the Royal Historical Society’s ‘New Historical Perspectives’ series in 2021. He is currently beginning a new project on Scottish ‘energy nationalisms’, which is supported by a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant. This research will inform international debates over the political economy of fossil fuels and renewables, sub-state nationalisms and policy routes to achieving an environmental ‘just transition’.

We extend a warm welcome back to Angela Romano who was Honorary Research Fellow at our School in 2013–2015 and has returned as a Lecturer in International Political Economy. Angela has spent the last five years as Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) where she co-ran the ERC-funded project PanEur1970s. Before that she was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at LSE International History Department, and Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI. An international historian of 20th Century, her main research interests include the Cold War, the variety of regional integration and cooperation processes, and international economic relations. She has published extensively on these subjects and has been invited to numerous conferences and seminars in Europe, Russia, the United States, and Japan. Her second monograph – The European Community and Eastern Europe in the Cold War – will be published soon by Routledge. Angela has also a rich teaching experience, which includes an invited Associate Professorship at the University of Tokyo in January 2020.

We also welcome Mark Stephens who is re-joining the university as Ian Mactaggart Chair in Land, Property and Urban Studies. For the past eight years Mark has been at Heriot-Watt University where he was Director of The Urban Institute. Mark’s interests lie in many aspects of housing systems and their interactions with the wider social and economic system. His research on housing and poverty has demonstrated that housing systems can weaken the link between low incomes and poor housing. He has also contributed to the understanding of housing market volatility. Mark has a particular interest in the comparative (international) study of housing systems, something he began in his first post as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Research Fellow at Glasgow in 1991. He is lead editor of the UK Housing Review, and a contributor to the Crisis Homelessness Monitor series. Mark is an experienced editor having founded the International (formerly European) Journal of Housing Policy, served as an editor of Urban Studies and has recently been appointed as an editor of the Routledge Explorations in Housing Studies series.

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First published: 19 May 2020