Meet the new teaching staff in the School of Politics and International Relations

This autumn we welcomed for new academics to the school. Get to know a bit more about them and their areas of expertise.

William Daniel

Will is an Assistant Professor in comparative politics. He has joined us from Francis Marion University (South Carolina, USA) and holds a Masters and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Will's research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, with regional expertise in European politics. He is particularly interested in how the additional level of European governance effects change in the national political systems of European Union members and candidate member states. His related book, Career Behaviour and the European Parliament: All Roads Lead through Brussels? was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Will teaches on comparative political institutions, the legislative and party politics of Europe, European Union studies, and the methodology of social science research design. He is the module convenor for the year one module, 'Introduction to Comparative Politics.’

Natalie Martin

Natalie joins us from Nottingham Trent University. She did her PhD on the Turkey-EU accession process at Loughborough University and has expertise in Turkey and the Turkey-EU relationship as well as an interest in the security implications of Brexit. Before returning to academia, Natalie was a journalist for the BBC and has more recently turned research attention to the role of the news media in democracy – or lack of it. She is currently writing about the securitisation of news in Turkey for Palgrave.

Natalie's teaching focuses on politics and international relations theories, metatheories and methodologies. It also takes an area studies approach to the region from Turkey and its environs to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Kerem Oge

Kerem is an Assistant Professor in international relations. He studied at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) for a BSc in International Relations and a Minor degree in International Economics. Kerem has an MA in International Political Economy from the University of Warwick and received his PhD in Political Science from Boston College in 2013. He has held postdoctoral positions at Université Laval and McGill University and joined our school from University of Wales Trinity Saint David where he was a lecturer in International Political Economy.

Kerem's research interests include Transparency, Political Economy of Natural Resources, Corruption, Energy Geopolitics, the Caspian Region, and Turkey and he has published in journals including Energy Policy, Resources Policy, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Europe-Asia Studies, and Turkish Studies. He is currently writing a book manuscript The Transit Curse which explores the geopolitical dynamics of the resource curse and highlights the increased vulnerability of energy transit countries in Eurasia.  Kerem primarily teaches on international relations and international political economy. 

Ana Pontes

Ana is as an Assistant Professor here at the School of Politics and International Relations. She received her PhD in Politics and International Relations from Nottingham Trent University in 2019. Her research interests include youth’s political engagement and participation, citizenship education, and the role of arts in the political context, especially theatre for social change and theatre of the oppressed. Ana's current research focuses on the measurement of youth political engagement, and she has been contributing to research on other topics related to young people and politics. In 2018, she published a co-authored article in Societies journal titled Towards a Conceptualization of Young People’s Political Engagement: A Qualitative Focus Group Study.