I am Senior Lecturer in Politics, Director of the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and PGR Director for Politics.

I joined the Politics Department at the University of Manchester in 2016. Previously, I held a lectureship in World Politics and Sustainable Development at the University of Helsinki (Finland) from 2014 to 2016 and a post-doc at the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University (Australia) in 2012/13.

My research and teaching activities focus on the politics of global trade, global governance, development, social movements, and feminist international political economy. I am interested in supervising PhD students in all of these fields.

Together with Dr Adrienne Roberts, Politics, University of Manchester, and Dr Erin Hannah, King's University College at Western University, I hold a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant titled "Gender Mainstreaming in Global Trade Governance". The purpose of the research is to explore how the gender mainstreaming agenda in global trade governance is politically contested, and what it means to bring a feminist ontology to the study and conduct of global trade relations. We have completed a SSHRC Insight Development Grant titled "SheTrades: Gendering Global Trade Governance" and a joint Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and SSHRC knowledge synthesis project titled "Gendering Global Trade through Canada-UK Trade Relationships". 

My monograph Transformations in Trade Politics: Participatory Trade Politics in West Africa (Routledge 2014) examines the role of West African civil society organisations in negotiating the Economic Partnership Agreement between the Economic Community of West African States and the European Union. It is based on my PhD dissertation that I completed at the University of Helsinki in 2012. It won three international awards: Best Dissertation 2013 of the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association, Best International Relations Doctoral Dissertation Produced at a Finnish University 2012-2014 of the Finnish Foundation for Foreign Policy Research, and the 2015 Dissertation Prize in Supranational Political Economy of the University of Pavia.

My co-edited volume (with Erin Hannah and James Scott) Expert Knowledge in Global Trade (Routledge 2016) investigates the role of experts in generating, disseminating and legitimating knowledge about the possibilities of trade to work for global development.

I am a co-editor of the journal Globalizations, a member of the editorial board of Contemporary Politics and of the international advisory board of the Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy series of Palgrave Macmillan. 

I am a member of the World Trade Organization Gender Research Hub and have advised trade policy-makers and civil society activists working on trade in the UK, Germany, Finland, Australia, and within the Economic Community of West African States.

I have appeared on BBC World Service Radio's 2018 documentary "The Great Unravelling" in episode 4 (Trump and Trade) and episode 5 (Trade and China) and have commented on the EU-UK trade deal on BBC Radio Manchester.