Eloïse Bertrand
Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences
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Biography
Dr Eloïse Bertrand is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations. She joined the University of Nottingham in August 2023, after having held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick and the University of Portsmouth. She obtained her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick in 2020. She also has an MSc in African Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS/University of London) and undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Anglophone Studies from the University Lumière Lyon 2 (France).
In 2023, she was awarded a new investigator grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Counil (ESRC) to study the interplay between security, democratisation, and elite politics in the Sahel region.
Expertise Summary
Democratisation
Political parties and elections
Security
African Politics
Teaching Summary
Dr Bertrand's teaching interests are in comparative politics and qualitative research.
In 2023/2024, she is co-teaching POLI3128 African Politics.
Research Summary
Dr Bertrand's research focuses on party politics, institutions, governance, and security in sub-Saharan Africa. She's currently the Principal Investigator of a three-year ESRC-funded project on… read more
Recent Publications
PhD supervision:
I am interested in supervising doctoral projects in a range of comparative and African politics fields using qualitative or mixed methods, including the following topics:
- democratization, political parties, elections, political institutions, and mobilization in Africa and other world regions;
- conflict management and counter-insurgency in Africa (particularly the Sahel region);
- any topic in Francophone Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda.
Current Research
Dr Bertrand's research focuses on party politics, institutions, governance, and security in sub-Saharan Africa. She's currently the Principal Investigator of a three-year ESRC-funded project on security, democratisation, and elite politics in the Sahel (SDEP-Sahel). This comparative project investigates the mutual effects of democratisation processes and institutions, security approaches, and elites' political survival strategies in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria, and the implications of these findings for domestic and international policymakers' engagement in the region.
Past Research
Dr Bertrand's past research has looked at the role of opposition parties in hybrid regimes, the programmatic content of election campaigns, and the use of social media by parliamentary candidates. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in several African countries, including Burkina Faso and Uganda.