Our Staff

Paul Anderson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics. Paul's research largely focuses on comparative territorial politics. He is interested in autonomy and secessionist movements, regional political parties, majority and minority nationalisms, intergovernmental relations, and the use of autonomy as a tool of conflict resolution. Since 2017, Paul has been involved in an ongoing project with the Hanns Seidel Foundation on democracy and federalism in Myanmar, working with various stakeholders, such as activists, civil servants, parliamentarians and political parties. Currently, Paul is working on two book projects. The first, comparing territorial politics in Catalonia and Scotland, is currently under contract with Manchester University Press (to be published in 2023) and the second, Federalism and Conflict Resolution, (a co-authored book with Soeren Keil) will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.

Christinna Hazzard is a Lecturer in International Relations and Politics and works in the areas of postcolonial theory, cultural politics, and world-literature. She currently leads the first-year module “International History and State Formation”, the second-year module “Politics and Popular Culture”, and the final year module “Non-Western Political Theories”. Her research is interdisciplinary and comparative, exploring literary and cultural representations of national movements, the relationship between capitalism and culture, and the political and cultural significance of the semi-periphery. She has published research on the postcolonial politics of so-called “Nordic Noir” crime dramas and has a chapter forthcoming on Danish-Greenlandic political and cultural relations. She is also working on a joint project researching the impact of Arts and Humanities Foundation programmes on diversity in Higher Education.

Matthew Alan Hill runs the International Relations and Politics subject. His current research examines US foreign policy. Matthew has recently published a book on the rise and fall of US democracy promotion. He is currently examining the role of democracy promotion in the Obama administration during the Arab Spring whilst on a fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute (RAI). He is also working on two other long-term projects looking at the impact of climate change on democracies at the theoretical and practical levels and examining sovereignty disputes between the US and the US over certain Pacific Islands during and after WWII.

Rabea Khan is a lecturer in International Relations and Politics. Rabea joined Liverpool John Moores University in January 2023, having previously lectured at the University of Edinburgh. Rabea received her PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and also holds an M.Litt. in International Security Studies from her Almer Mater. Rabea’s research interests include but are not limited to: terrorism, religion, race, gender, post- and decolonial theory, feminist theory and critical discourse analysis. She has published with Critical Studies on Terrorism and Critical Research on Religion and is currently working on her first monograph entitled the ‘The gendered coloniality of the Religious Terrorism Thesis’, based on her doctoral thesis with the same title. Rabea will be convening the following modules: L4: International History and State Formation and L6: Gender, Peace, and Security.

Calvin (Xin) Liu is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. His research examines the patterns and forms of non-western international systems and their potential theoretical critiques of western conceptions of modern international relations. He analyses China’s pre-modern diplomatic and military relations with peripheral states in Asia and the specific non-western understanding of sovereignty, nation-state and security thence developed. Calvin also explores the formation of national identities in the postcolonial context, with a regional focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan and the peripheral Chinese communities and their contested identities about the image of ‘China’. Further details can be found here.

Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics with Sociology. He leads Introduction to International Relations (first year), International Organisations (second year), Securing Spaces (final year) and the Research Project in IR (MA). His research fields include (re-)constructions of ‘security’ and security policies in European contexts through the lens of sport mega-events. Moreover, he’s also interested in the wider intersections between politics, risk, crime and global sport. Jan’s research has been frequently published in internationally recognized journals. He is also the author of three books: 'Sport Mega-Events, Security and Covid-19: Securing the Football World' (Routledge, 2022); 'Sport and Crime: Towards a Critical Criminology of Sport' (co-authored with Peter Millward and Jonathan Sly, Routledge, 2022); and 'Football and Risk: Trends and Perspectives' (Routledge, 2022).

Peter O’Reilly is a Lecturer in International Relations and Politics. Peter’s research broadly focuses on the political economy of regional integration and trade in Africa. He has researched the role of economic discourses in legitimising/delegitimising regional integration in East Africa and the role of regional institutions as spaces of policy innovation and contestation for policymakers, civil society organisations and private sector groups. He is currently collaborating on a project with Peg Murray-Evans (York) on the politics of pharmaceutical production in Africa in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. He completed his PhD at the Department of Politics, University of York in 2019 and was previously a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC funded project ‘Regionalism in East Africa, c.1900 to present’, which he continues to collaborate on. Currently, Peter leads the Level 5 module ‘International Politics at the Regional Level’ and the Level 4 module ‘Understanding the Theories Behind Politics’.

Luba Zatsepina joined Liverpool John Moores University as a Lecturer in International Relations and Politics in January 2023. Prior to that, she was a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh teaching on courses related to Global Security, Gender, and Strategic Studies. Previously, Luba held a research post in Proliferation and Nuclear Policy team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) where she focused on strategic culture and nuclear arms control. Luba’s research interests, as was her specific PhD project, are broadly situated in the field of Critical Security Studies. Awarded in 2020, her PhD research focused on nuclear weapons policy in the Soviet Union during the Cold War with particular emphasis on discursive and gendered constructions of identity. She is interested in the ways that gender and identity constructions enable or preclude states’ decisions regarding nuclear proliferation, arms control, and disarmament. Luba’s current work aims to apply a similar framework to chemical and biological warfare.