Russian foreign policy, contemporary Russian history and politics, Intellectual history, Nationalism

My three main research areas are Russian foreign policy; Russian nationalism in the 20th century; and political history of the USSR after Stalin. I am currently working on a new biography of Nikita Khrushchev for Routledge’s ‘Historical Biographies’ series.

I read philosophy and economics for BA (Hons) and did an MA in Legal and Political Theory at University College London (UCL), followed by a PhD on the Russian Eurasianist thinker Lev Gumliev at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL-SSEES).

I then worked at the University of Birmingham as a research fellow on an AHRC-funded project on the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. Two lecturing appointments followed at UCL-SSEES and at the University of Leeds where I taught Russian politics and foreing policy, before arriving at Queen’s University Belfast as Lecturer in Modern European History.