Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) of the University of Oxford. Previously, she was the Hellenic Bank Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSE’s Hellenic Observatory, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSE’s European Institute, from where she also holds her PhD. Her research focuses on the political economy of place. Her PhD thesis and articles in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society and New Political Economy explain under what conditions economic actors overcome the obstacles to cooperation in unfavourable settings and begin to work together to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, fostering economic development in fragmented economies. She is also a co-editor of a Special Issue on “firm-centred, multi-level approaches to overcoming semi-peripheral constraints”, which is forthcoming in Studies in Comparative International Development in 2024. Moreover, Kira has co-authored articles on the causes and impacts of Brexit at the local level, which were published in Politics & Society and Governance. She is also a co-author of The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost? (Palgrave Pivot, 2018), and she has written a chapter about the historical roots of pro- and anti-EU attitudes in Greece (in Gilbert and Pasquinucci 2020). Her newest project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is entitled “Land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies”, and it aims to develop and test a theory linking the landholding distribution in productive sectors and political preferences along the left-right and cosmopolitan-nationalist dimensions.

Kira's CV