Colin Hay

Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences (Professeur des Universités) in the Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics) and Affiliate Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he was the founding co-director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI). He was previously Professor of Political Analysis and Head of Department in POLSIS at the University of Birmingham, UK.

He studied at Cambridge and Lancaster Universities and has held visiting positions at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (US), in the Department of Political Science at MIT (US) and in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester (UK).

He is a founding co-editor of the journals Comparative European Politics (with Ben Rosamond of Warwick University and Martin A. Schain of New York University) and British Politics (with Peter Kerr of the University of Birmingham, Dave Marsh of the Australian National University and Stephen Kettell of the University of Warwick) and is lead editor of New Political Economy (currently ranked 11th in Political Science and 7th in International Relations in the Thomson Reuters citation index rankings). He was a member of the UK’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) sub-panel for politics and international studies and is chair of the politics and international studies panel in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in 2009.

He has been the co-recipient of major research grants from the ESRC on globalisation, European integration and the European social model. He is the author of Re-Stating Social and Political Change (Open University Press, 1996) which was awarded the Philip Abrams Awarding Body: ESRC Memorial Prize, The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring Under False Pretences? (Manchester University Press, 1999), Political Analysis (Palgrave, 2002), Why We Hate Politics (Polity, 2007, winner of the WJM Mackenzie Prize), The Political Economy of European Welfare Capitalism (Palgrave, 2012, with Daniel Wincott) and, most recently, The Failure of Anglo-Liberal Capitalism (Palgrave, 2013). In addition, he is co-author of Postwar British Politics in Perspective (Polity, 1999), and editor of New Directions in Political Science (Palgrave, 2010 – produced to mark the 60th Anniversary of the PSA), British Politics Today (Polity, 2002), Developments in British Politics 9 (Palgrave, 2011), The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis (Routledge, 2010), European Politics (Oxford University Press, 2007), The State: Theories and Issues (Palgrave, 2006), Demystifying Globalisation (Palgrave, 2000), and Theorising Modernity (Longman, 1999). He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of British Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008) and of the Sage Encyclopedia of Governance (Sage, 2007). He is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes including the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (1997), BISA´s Review of International Studies Prize (2001), the UKPAC prize (2004), the WJM Mackenzie Prize (2008) and the Richard Rose Prize (2009). His co-edited collection on The Legacy of Thatcherism has been published by Oxford University Press and the British Academy this year.

Colin´Hays research interests are diverse, ranging widely from the contemporary condition of political disaffection and disengagement which characterises the advanced liberal democracies, via the development of the state and the welfare state in the postwar period, the comparative political economy of neoliberalism, European integration and globalisation, and the political economy of price, preference and taste formation in the market for Bordeaux wines, to the ontological and epistemological foundations of political analysis. These seemingly disparate research strands are linked by a common concern to interrogate and elucidate the often complex and contingent processes of change which characterise the advanced liberal democracies, together with a desire to locate these polities and political economies within their broader comparative and international settings.