Other News
New Academic Staff
We are delighted to introduce you to our new academic staff who have joined the department this week.
Dr Mathew Coakley (Teaching Fellow, Political Theory)
Dr Coakley studied Social and Political Sciences at King's College Cambridge before doing an MA in War Studies at King's College, London and then a PhD in Political Theory at New York University. Prior to coming to PAIS he taught at the London School of Economics & Political Science. His primary areas of research are political theory and ethics, with interests in epistemology and the philosophy of economics.
Mathew has published on the value of political legitimacy, the ethics of sweatshops and the problem of how to add up interests / make welfare comparisons, with his first book - "On the Structure of Moral Theories" (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2015) - looking at the options for how to simultaneously morally evaluate both agents and the actions they undertake, and the impact institutions might have on such evaluations.
Dr Georg Loefflmann (Teaching Fellow, US Foreign Policy and American Politics)
Between 2011 and 2014 Dr Georg Loefflmann undertook his PhD studies at PAIS. His PhD thesis is titled: "The Fractured Consensus - How competing visions of grand strategy challenge the geopolitical identity of American leadership under the Obama presidency," and was supervised by and .
Previously, Dr Loefflmann has studied International Relations in Germany at the FU Berlin, the Humboldt-University, and the University of Potsdam, with a focus on German and European foreign and security policy and constructivist research perspectives.
His research focuses on the geopolitical contextualization and representation of national identity and how this informs the formulation of grand strategy and foreign and security policy.
Dr Briony Jones (Assistant Professor, International Development)
Briony Jones is joining PAIS from swisspeace, an Associate Research Institute of the University of Basel, Switzerland where she has worked since 2011. She in fact studied at PAIS as an undergraduate and has since then completed a MA and PhD in International Development at the University of Manchester. Developing her research and teaching focus on International Development Briony first worked as a Lecturer in International Development at Manchester and then moved to Switzerland where she has been based in Political Science.
Briony will be teaching on the core MA in International Development module 'Theories and Issues in International Development'. She will be continuing her research work focused on the intersection between development, peacebuilding and transitional justice with a special interest on the politics of intervention, knowledge production, citizenship and political identities at times of transition. She has worked on the case studies of Uganda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cote d'Ivoire, specialising in qualitative research methodologies.
Dr Chris Rossdale (Teaching Fellow, International Relations)
Dr Chris Rossdale previously lectured at Royal Holloway and City University London. He has a PhD from PAIS, and in 2014 was awarded the BISA Michael Nicholson Prize for best thesis in International Studies.
His research sits at the intersection between international relations theory and the study of resistance, looking at the ways in which our understandings of international politics shift when we begin from the perspective of radical social movements. His PhD thesis looked at the ways in which anti-militarist social movements can help us rethink (and better resist) the concepts and politics of security and militarism. Dr Rossdale is currently in the process of developing a new research project which seeks to interrogate the role of political solidarity in the international system.
Dr Reiko Shindo (Teaching Fellow, International Security)
Before joining PAIS, Dr Shindo was based at the University of Tokyo (Japan) as an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program on Human Security. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University (UK).
Reiko’s research is situated at the intersection between politics and geography. Most of her work derives from a general interest in citizenship and community. In particular, she examines how the ambiguous boundaries of citizenship are transforming conventional meanings of politics and the space of political community. Reiko has been committed to interdisciplinary research by drawing on works mainly from citizenship studies, migration studies, border studies, and critical International Relations.