I am Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Concurrently I am an Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellow and hold the position of Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

My research is animated by questions surrounding the politics and governance of energy, production and financial systems under conditions of heightened geoeconomic and geopolitical competition. A recurring theme in my work is the role of transnational corporations in shaping divergent trajectories of industrial development. I am methodologically pluralist, combining multi-sited, multi-lingual fieldwork with advanced computational methods.

I am an elected member of the Executive Council and co-organiser of Network Q: Asian Capitalisms of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Early Career Representative of the Journals Committee of the Regional Studies Association and co-lead of the Finance and Money working group of the China in Europe Research Network. I am also a research associate of the Second Cold War Observatory and the Global Network on Financial Geography.

My work has been quoted by the Financial Times and Bloomberg, and I have advised the European Commission, Spanish Business and Enterprise, Austrian Foundation for Development Research and the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds among others on wide-ranging policy issues including Chinese foreign investment and overcapacity, sovereign wealth funds, and debt transparency.

For a full list of publications, see my Google Scholar page.

Transition Pathways in the Periphery

Resource-rich developing countries like Serbia and Indonesia face significant challenges in the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy technology, but US-China rivalry has seen them take on strategic relevance in the race to secure critical minerals, energy infrastructure and supply chain resilience for green technologies. This project adopts a transnational analytical perspective - beyond, within and through states as unitary actors - to examine how US-China rivalry shapes resource-rich developing states' transition pathways and the extent to which it alters their peripherality in the world economy.

This project is funded by an Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellowship.

State-Market Relations in China and Beyond

Global growth in state ownership, industrial policy, and the fusion of public and private domains are increasingly at odds with conventional neoliberal thinking. Given China’s centrality to global trade, production, and financial networks, domestic shifts there both illuminate and drive shifting paradigms of state-market relations elsewhere. Designed to empirically analyse China’s evolving state–market relations as both a site and lens for understanding global capitalist reconfigurations, this project analyses the key drivers, mechanisms, and implications of China’s evolving state-market dynamics and how they interact with policy changes in the US, Europe and beyond.

This project is co-lead with Sarah Eaton (Humboldt), Wendy Leutert (Indiana), Kean Fan Lim (Newcastle) and Tamar Ozery Groswald (Hebrew Uni Jerusalem), and funded by the Lorentz Centre.

Europe Adrift

Europe is adrift in the face of great turmoil and transformation. The liberal international order that emerged after the Cold War has disintegrated and the EU lacks a coherent strategic vision for responding to – let alone shaping – the emergent world order. This project takes the dynamics of intensifying global inter-state competition as an entry point to survey the erosion of European security, growth and normative power whose foundations were laid in the neoliberal era, the contradictions contestations and constraints revealed in the responses from European actors in the face of this erosion, and how European power and prosperity is being reshaped in unexpected ways.

This project is co-lead with Nick Jepson (Manchester), Seth Schindler (Manchester), Naná de Graaff (VU Amsterdam), funded by the China in Europe Research Network and the Vrije Universiteit Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies, and has resulted in a forthcoming special issue in New Political Economy.