Professor Ben Rosamond
Job Title
Professor of Politics and International Relations
Room number
4.29Building (Address)
Chrystal Macmillan BuildingStreet (Address)
15a George SquareCity (Address)
EdinburghCountry (Address)
ScotlandPost code (Address)
EH8 9LDResearch interests
Research interests
Ben works at the intersection of International Political Economy and European Union studies with his current research and teaching interests covering the politics of economic ideas and economic expertise, the political economy of Brexit, the politics of European disintegration, the sociology of academic knowledge and the politics and governance of crisis.
Publications
If the tab above isn't working, you can access information about Ben's recent publications via his Edinburgh Research Explorer page here
PhD Supervision
Ben is especially interested in supervising PhD students with interests in the following areas: (a) how economic ideas and ideas about the economy shape politics, policy-making and democracy; (b) the political economy and politics of Brexit; (c) the politics of austerity; (d) the political economy of the European Union and regional integration more generally: and (e) the mutual constitution of academic and policy knowledge. Ben's own work is focused primarily on advanced capitalist democracies in Europe and the EU, but he has extensive experience of supervising PhDs on (for example) China and Latin America. As a card carrying methodological pluralist, Ben is happy to work with doctoral students working from a variety of approaches and theoretical standpoints. A selection of PhDs recently supervised to completion: 'Free Trade Agreements through a Prism: Explaining the Making of Trade Policies from a Subcentral Government Context'; 'The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Platforms and Participation in Contemporary Politics'; 'Bad Banking and the Rise of Financialised Capitalism in China'; Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch'; 'The Diplomacy of Transitioning: The EU's Management of Globalisation in UN Negotiations on Sustainable Development'; 'Hegemonic Projects. Interventions on the Politics of Elite Legitimation in China'.
Ben is on research leave during the 2025/26 academic year
Background
Ben Rosamond joined PIR in August 2022 from the University of Copenhagen, where he had been Professor of Political Science since 2011. Prior to that he was Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He is also founding co-editor of Comparative European Politics. His eight books include Theories of European Integration (Macmillan 2000) and most recently The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies (co-editor, Routledge 2021). A native of Guernsey in the Channel Islands and a dual British-Swedish citizen, Ben studied at the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield, gaining his PhD from the latter in 1993. He was hired to a lectureship in European Integration at Warwick in 1995 after four years at Oxford Brookes University. Over the years, he has also held visiting positions at, inter alia, the ANU, Columbia, Edinburgh, NYU and Oxford. At Copenhagen, in addition to a stints as director of research and as a member the departmental leadership team, Ben was PI of a large interdisciplinary project (involving social sciences, Law and the humanities) on ‘Europe’s New Global Challenges’ and he recently led a work package on the Horizon 2020 project EU3D (‘Differentiation, Dominance, Democracy’). Ben served as Head of PIR between 2022 and 2025.
Works within
Staff Hours and Guidance
I am on research leave during the 2025-26 academic year. Appointments by email.