Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni

Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) of the University of Oxford. Previously, she was the Hellenic Bank Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSE’s Hellenic Observatory, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSE’s European Institute, from where she also holds her PhD. 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 PhD thesis, article in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, and forthcoming article in New Political Economy explain under what conditions economic actors overcome the obstacles to cooperation in unfavourable settings and begin to work together, fostering upgrading in fragmented economies. The Special Issue that she has co-edited (forthcoming in Studies in Comparative International Development) develops a firm-centred approach to overcoming semi-peripheral constraints to economic development, going beyond the literature on the developmental state and challenging the 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 Minister 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).