I work on two main lines of research. The first deals with political behaviour and comparative politics questions in Europe, and the second deals with the impact of migration processes on public attitudes and political outcomes. More specifically, I have devoted some time now to analyse how the immigration issue is incorporated into patterns of political competition and affects electoral outcomes, both in countries with and without a prominent anti-immigrant party in Parliament. Regarding my political behaviour and comparative politics line of research, I am working on a number of projects assessing the conditional effect of institutions, media discourse and party system characteristics on different forms of voting, including proximity, directional, and valence voting. I am also studying the interaction between power-sharing institutions and traditional individual-level predictors of electoral turnout. Finally, I am also interested in the formation of subjective perceptions of the national economy, and the moderating effect of personal socioeconomic circumstances and party messages in this process. As for my research on immigration, I mostly analyse patterns of xenophobia and racism from a comparative perspective in Europe. More specifically, I deal with the direct or indirect impact of several predictors on attitudes towards immigration, namely personality traits, local and national levels of ethnic diversity, and ideological predispositions. More recently I have also implemented longitudinal analyses of xenophobia over individual life cycles using panel data, and survey experiments assessing the impact of different forms of ethnic diversity on the willingness to redistribute resources in a given community.
I am a social theorist working on the historical, conceptual, and political implications of the life sciences. I have held two EU Marie Curie Fellowships, a Fulbright scholarship, and an Annual Membership (2014–2015) at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA. I am the author of Political Biology: Science and Social Value in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016)
Geoff Gilbert is a Professor of Law in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He was Head of Department between 2000-2003 and 2011-13. In 2012, he was appointed a Professorial Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law since 2002. He is author of ‘Current Issues in the Application of the Exclusion Clauses’ in Feller, Türk and Nicholson, Refugee Protection in International Law (2003), part of UNHCR’s Global Consultations on the 50th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention. He was founding Director of Studies for UNHCR’s annual Thematic Refugees and Human Rights course for judges, government officials and UNHCR staff at the International Institute for Humanitarian Law, Sanremo, Italy, from 2005 to 2007. In 2014 he was appointed a consultant to UNHCR (with Anna Magdalena Rüsch) on Rule of Law: Engagement for Solutions and is part of the Solutions Alliance Thematic Group on Rule of Law. He was Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in its inquiry into the treatment of asylum-seekers, 2006-07. He was part of the Human Rights Centre's research programme on human rights in situations of acute crisis that was carried out on behalf of DfID and then directed Essex's residential training programme of human rights for DfID staff, 2006-07. He drafted a report in 2010 for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on a possible Protocol to the ECHR dealing with minority rights. He has carried out human rights training on behalf of the Council of Europe and UNHCR in the Russian Federation (Siberia, the Urals and Kalmykskaya), Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He has advised governments on their laws in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the FSU, and was the Director of the OSCE training programme on combating torture for judges in Serbia and Montenegro. His areas of interest are international criminal law, the protection of refugees and other displaced persons in international law, the protection of minorities in international law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. In 2009 he was elected a Bencher of the Middle Temple and was called in February 2010.
I am principally interested in the relationship between representations of conflict and politics in early twentieth-century France. I am the author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War and France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War next Door, 1936-1945. I am also interested in the relationship between political commitment and utopianism and the memory of the First World War in twentieth-century French culture. I am a member of the executive committee of the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS), based at the Universities of Bristol, Swansea and Westminster, and am one of the editors of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. In addition to this, I also have an interest in French crime fiction, particularly the novels of Sébastien Japrisot. My teaching interests are French literature, culture, and history of the early twentieth century. I also teach general history and literature courses in Year 1 and final-year language. I am unit convenor for two final-year units: Representations of War, which studies the depiction of war in the twentieth-century French novel and cinema, and Challenging the Republic, which examines a variety of political movements that have contested the form of the French Republic since the 1920s. In the 2nd year I convene The Third Republic, which studies the social and political history of France from 1870 to 1940, and co-teach Modern French Narrative, a unit examining French fiction from the 1920s to the present. I also teach courses on war and culture at postgraduate level and am co-supervising two M.Litt/PhD theses: James McFarthing, ‘Utopian Theory and the Science Fiction of Jules Verne’ and Claire Thomas, ‘Ungaretti, giornalista’. I am also currently Deputy Head of School Teaching and Learning. I would particularly welcome research students working on 20th-century cultural representations of conflict and/or political engagement and cultural politics in France. My students can consult me in my office at the following time during term times:Thursday 10-11am and 3-4pm. Biography I studied French and Italian at the University of Exeter where I also later completed a PGCE (after a year working at the Université de Rennes II). I spent several years in secondary education pretending that I didn't miss academia until coming to Bristol as a PhD student. I completed my doctoral thesis, 'Forming the Modern Mind: A Reappraisal of the French Combat Novel of World War One', in 2000 under the supervision of Gino Raymond. That same year, I became a lecturer here in the Department of French. I am one of the editors of the Journal of War and Culture Studies and an executive member of the Group for War and Culture Studies, currently based at the University of Westminster. I am a keen runner and cyclist and an occasional triathlete.
Research interests include the application of geodesy to the mitigation of natural hazards, volcanic, tectonic, oceanographic and meteorological processes, and the impact and mitigation of the atmosphere on space geodetic measurements.
Professor David Stebenne teaches American legal history in the Moritz College of Law and modern U.S. political history in The Ohio State University History Department. He graduated from Yale magna cum laude in 1982 and then earned a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from Columbia University through a joint-degree program that produces legal historians. He is a member of the Maryland Bar who moved directly into teaching, first at Yale (1991-1993) and then Ohio State (since 1993). Professor Stebenne’s dissertation on the life and work of former labor lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 under the title Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal. While doing research on that project, Professor Stebenne worked with Goldberg directly during the last nine years of his life. His second book was a study of the life and work of Arthur Larson, the legal academic who wrote the leading treatise on workers’ compensation law and also held three high-ranking posts in the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indiana University Press published this book under the title Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years in 2006. Professor Stebenne’s third book (co-authored with Joseph Mitchell) was a history of Columbia, Md., the planned suburban “new town” created by Baltimore lawyer and real estate developer James Rouse. This book was published by The History Press under the title New City Upon A Hill: A History of Columbia, Maryland in 2007. He is at work on his fourth book, which is a political and legal history of the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1960s. The book’s working title is An Era of Moderation: The United States, 1933-1968. Professor Stebenne also has written many articles, essays, and book reviews for a variety of legal and historical publications. Among the most recent is one titled “Who Really Won the Election of 1960?” which was first published on the Election Law @ Moritz website, and then on the History News Network (HNN) website and in print in the Columbus Bar Lawyers Quarterly. He is interested in the history of American elections and in contemporary national politics. He serves the Election Law @ Moritz team as its “elections historian.” He comments regularly on national politics for both local and national media. Professor Stebenne co-chaired (along with law professor Edward B. Foley and former political science professor Paul Beck) the Democracy Studies Speakers Series during 2012 and 2013. He served on the editorial board that oversaw the writing of a history of the Ohio General Assembly by historian David Gold. It was published in 2009 by Ohio University Press under the title Democracy in Session: A History of the Ohio General Assembly. Professor Stebenne serves as the chair of the committee overseeing the Ohio General Assembly Oral History Project, which is interviewing present and former Ohio lawmakers. He also is assisting the Ohio Supreme Court in its efforts to create an Ohio Supreme Court Historical Society. Professor Stebenne is serving a three-year term on the Littleton-Griswold Prize Committee of the American Historical Association. The prize is awarded annually to author of the best book on American legal history. He has won awards for his research, teaching and service.
