I am a Professor of International Affairs and hold the Neal Family Chair. I co-direct the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy and the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies, a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence. Beyond Georgia Tech, I am co-editor of JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. I was chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) (2015-17).
Before joining Georgia Tech in 2011 I taught at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom for 10 years. Prior to that I held research posts at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and the University of Sussex, outside Brighton in the UK. I have also studied or worked in France, Hungary and Russia (then the Soviet Union), as well as taught, given talks or conducted research in a dozen more countries.
My research and teaching fall primarily within International Political Economy, with a particular focus on the European Union. Although I have been interested in International Relations as long as I can remember, perhaps because I was born to British parents in the U.S., the focus of my interests have changed over time. As an undergraduate, at the University of Pennsylvania, I was a Cold Warrior (hence my studying Russian in the USSR). The Soviet Union collapsed during the first year of my master’s program at Columbia University, and my interests shifted towards political and economic transition, shaped not least by my internship at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, which began two weeks after the non-communist government came to power in 1990. Motivated by an extraordinary opportunity to conduct research with Helen Wallace at the University of Sussex, my interests shifted yet further west with the ‘completion’ in 1992 of the European Union’s single market program, the most intensive and extensive example of regulatory cooperation in the world. With my PhD my focus shifted again to the interaction between European economic integration and the wider world. That remains my principal focus.