Jan Čulík is a graduate of Charles University, Prague. He has been working as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies at the University of Glasgow since 1995. After being employed as a lecturer in Czech Studies at the Universities of Glasgow and Lancaster in the early 1980s, he worked as an independent producer and film maker for the UK TV station Channel Four Television. His Channel Four documentary “Orpheus through the Ages” (1984) received a Scottish BAFTA (TRIC) award for the best film in the Music and Arts category in 1986. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jan Čulík has also worked as a journalist for the Czechoslovak section of the BBC World Service and for the US station Radio Free Europe. In 1996, he founded a Czech-language cultural and political internet daily Britské listy (blisty.cz), which has currently some 3 million individual readers per year (Google Analytics). He is well-known as a public commentator in the Czech Republic. Jan Čulík is the author of two monographs on post-communist Czech cinema, one published in Czech and one in English. He has recently also produced an international monograph dealing with the construction of mythologies in the Central and East European TV series.
Professor Tameka Lester is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Philip C. Cook Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, GA. She teaches courses in federal income taxation and clinical skills. She holds her undergraduate degree from Winthrop University, her Masters in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix, and her Juris Doctor from North Carolina Central University School of Law.
John Van Reenen is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Director of the Centre of Economic Performance. He is the winner of the 2009 Yrjö Jahnsson Award (European equivalent to the Bates Clark Medal) He has been a senior policy advisor to 10 Downing Street, the UK Secretary of State for Health and European Commission. He is a Research Fellow at the CEPR and NBER. He received his BA from the University of Cambridge, his MSc from the London School of Economics and his PhD from University College London. Since 2003 he has been a member of the economics faculty of LSE, where he has taught industrial economics, labour economics and econometrics. He has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, at Princeton and Denning Visiting Professor of Global Business and Economics at Stanford.
Professor's Palan's work lies at the intersection between international relations, political economy, political theory, sociology and human geography. He wrote a number of books and numerous articles, book chapters and encyclopaedia entries on the subject of Offshore and Tax havens, state theory and international political economic theory. His work has been translated to Chinese, simple and complex characters, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Azeri and Czech.
Dan is a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford. In his doctoral thesis, ‘Fighting Rust: The Long Economic Crisis and the Rebuilding of the Northeast and Midwest’, Dan explores the political and economic forces that helped transform the Northeast and the Midwest from industrial to post-industrial during the 1970s and 1980s. Chronicling the efforts that members of the business community, labor unions, community activists and elected officials (local and national) made to help struggling industries and geographic regions negotiate the shifting economic terrain between 1974 and 1988 Dan examines the interlinked histories of urban decline, deindustrialisation, and economic development. By thoroughly examining the political environment of the 1970s and 1980s from a local and regional level Dan hopes to challenge the assumption that the economic success of the 1990s was produced by the limited government and free market policies of the Reagan administration or the ingenuity of individual entrepreneurs.
Having previously worked as a political journalist and a lobbyist at Westminster, Michelle joined Royal Holloway as Lecturer in International Relations in 2012. She has articles in prominent journals, including Security Studies and International Affairs, and has two books published: a sole-authored book analysing WMD and the strategic use of concepts, and an edited volume on the Obama administration and continuity in US foreign policy.
