Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni

Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. She received her PhD at the LSE's European Institute. Her research focuses on the politics and political economy of place in European countries. In the context of a growing recognition that spatial inequality profoundly affects political outcomes, she studies the institutional and socio-political factors that affect economic performance at the local level, on the one hand, and the impact of local economic trajectories on political attitudes and outcomes, on the other.

Kira's Leverhulme Fellowship project is entitled "Land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies". Another strand of her work, including articles in New Political Economy and the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (among others), explains under what conditions economic actors start working together despite institutional obstacles in unfavourable settings. A Special Issue that she recently co-edited aims to improve our understanding of developmental trajectories in semi-peripheral areas, challenging the stark North-South divide in the political economy and international development literatures. Her publications in Politics & Society and Governance address the causes and impacts of Brexit in post-industrial areas, while her article in Political Studies Review explores some broader conceptual issues about the link between geography, globalization, and populism. She is also co-author of The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost? (Palgrave Pivot, 2018).

She has taught courses on EU politics, the political economy of the green transition, international relations, and qualitative methods in Oxford, London, Bologna, Washington DC, and Athens. In addition to her academic positions, she has worked as a policy advisor in the Greek Ministry of Education, a policy officer at the European Commission’s SRSS (now DG REFORM), and a trainee in the cabinet of the President of the European Commission. She obtained a BA in History & Politics from the University of Oxford (2013) and an MA in International Relations & International Economics from Johns Hopkins SAIS (2015).