The Faculty

Bryan Cheang is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance & Society at King’s College London, where he received his PhD and MA in Political Economy. Separately he is the Co-Director and Fellow of the LSE Hayek Program, at STICERD, LSE.

His research interests are in the intersection of philosophy, politics and economics with a particular focus on comparative political economy, the ethics of market exchange, the role of the state in development, the challenge of effective industrial policy, and Asian politics. At the same time, he is also exploring the cultural compatibility of liberal political economy in non-Western societies. He has published numerous articles and books, including Economic Liberalism and the Developmental State: Hong Kong and Singapore’s Post-War Development (2022), and Institutions and Economic Development (2023). He is currently working on a handbook on liberal political economy, a critique of mission-oriented industrial strategy, and an edited volume on Southeast Asian development under contract with Oxford University Press.

Dr. Roberto Fumagalli is senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and has research affiliations with the London School of Economics and the University of Pennsylvania. At King’s College London, he has served as Director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, Director of the MA Public Policy Program, and Senior Tutor.

Roberto’s research interests cover a wide range of areas, including philosophy of economics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, philosophy and public policy. He has published more than 30 articles in a wide range of top-ranked international journals across these and additional areas. 

Roberto has given more than 160 talks at conferences / workshops around the world and has been visiting scholar at multiple world-leading research institutions. His research projects have received support from several national and international funders, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Mark Pennington is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, Head of the Department and Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society.

Mark works at the intersection of philosophy, politics and economics and is particularly interested in the application of non-ideal theorising in both political and economic theory, as exemplified in his development of the ‘robust political economy’ paradigm.

Mark is currently working on major research project ‘The Ideal of Self Governance’, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Inspired by the research agenda of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, this project applies the robust political economy perspective to examine both the positive and normative case for governance arrangements that lie ‘beyond markets and states’.

Dr. Samuel DeCanio FRGS is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy. His research examines general theoretical questions about how knowledge interacts with social, economic, and political institutions, and specific historical questions about the creation of modern bureaucratic states.  He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Critical Review, Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Studies in American Political Development.  His first book, Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (Yale University Press, 2015), examines democratic control over the creation of the American regulatory state in the late 19^th century.  His current book manuscript, Politics, Markets, and War: How Conflict and Ignorance Shape the Modern World (advanced contract with Yale University Press), examines how knowledge and ignorance influence economic markets, democratic politics, and the causes of war among states.

He has received grants from the British Academy, the Hill Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Raheem Sterling Foundation, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Oxford Russia Fund.  In 2023 Dr. DeCanio was awarded the Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society for his research into British travel writers and the Bedouin of the Middle East.  Dr. DeCanio is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he co-directs (with Dr. Michael Bankole) the Raheem Sterling Scholarship Program at King’s College London, and is the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society.  Prior to arriving at King’s he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Yale University where he was also a resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Elena Yi-Jia Zeng is the Assistant Director and Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society, specialising in modern political theory and European intellectual history. Her research addresses the epistemological and institutional factors that give rise to liberalism. In pursuing this line of inquiry, she investigates the role of scepticism in modern moral and political thought, focusing on Britain, France and Germany. Apart from canonical thinkers, she is interested in how leading cultural figures, such as Brahms, embodied liberal ideas to reconstruct the experiences and meanings of living in an age of liberalism.

Elena’s works have been published in peer-reviewed history, politics and philosophy journals. She is working on her first monograph The Politics of Belief in Enlightenment Scepticism, and a new project on the debates over economic and civilisational stagnation from the time of the Physiocrats to the Austrian School.

Elena was elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2025. She spent a year at Princeton University Centre for Human Values as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Political Theory. She obtained her PhD and won the Prince Consort Prize & Seeley Medal for the Best Dissertation of the Year from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge in 2024.

For more information, please visit Elena’s personal website and departmental profile page.

Kaveh is a political theorist. His research covers contemporary liberal thought, collective political agency, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction within political philosophy, and distributive justice. He is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, University of Arizona. He has previously taught at King’s College London and gained his PhD from the London School of Economics. His work is forthcoming or has been published in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and Social Philosophy and Policy.

Dr. Pablo Paniagua is an economist and a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. He is also a Senior Researcher at Fundación Para el Progreso and an Affiliated Scholar at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his M.Sc. in Economics and Finance from Milan Polytechnic and his Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of London.

His research focuses on governance and institutional analysis. He has authored over 20 articles, essays, and books dealing with various aspects of the political economy of money and banking and the governance of social dilemmas. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Institutional Economics, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, and Economy and Society, among several others.

Pavel Kuchař is an Assistant Professor at Palacký University in Olomouc. His research focuses on the political economy of entrepreneurship, economics of institutions, and the history of economics. He has published in journals such as Public Choice, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Revue d’Economie Politique, or Econ Journal Watch. He has also co-edited “Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons” and “Governing Corporate Knowledge Commons,” both part of the Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons  (Cambridge University Press). For a complete list of his publications, click here.

Mustafa is an infrastructure planning lawyer at the law firm TLT LLP, and Parliamentary Agent. He works on areas of public policy and planning, and has advised developers, central government and regulators on nationally significant infrastructure projects. These projects include nuclear, solar, wind, energy transmission, highways, and aviation projects, and includes the country’s most significant major projects such as the Lower Thames Crossing and the expansion of Luton Airport.

Mustafa was appointed to the Government’s Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce which aims to recommend reforms to the Prime Minister which would help speed up the deployment of nuclear reactors in the UK. Mustafa was recommended by a Panel of the House of Lords and House of Commons to be appointed as a Parliamentary Agent in 2022, and has promoted a third of all Private Bills which have Royal Assent since then. He has a particular interest in identifying win-win solutions in the planning, environmental and regulatory sphere.

Kaetana Numa completed her PhD in Political Economy at King’s College London in spring 2021. Her PhD research focused on the theory of fiscal illusion, as she undertook a large-scale randomised survey experiment to investigate how the provision of personalised fiscal information affects fiscal preferences in the UK.

She is currently working on publishing her findings regarding the extent of fiscal illusion, as well as the wider implications of fiscal misperception on the democratic development and fiscal governance. She is also interested in the economic and political development of communist and transition countries.

Prior to her PhD research, Kaetana worked at a Lithuanian think tank for almost a decade where she headed a fiscal policy unit and maintained an active presence both in the political arena and the media.

Kaetana graduated with a BA in Economics and International Relations (Cum Laude) from Tufts University, and also holds an MA in Religious Studies from Vilnius University.

Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies at UC Berkeley. He is also a Professor in Political Economy at King’s College, London, and Professor of Governance at United Nations University (MERIT).

Mark is a theorist in the social and policy sciences and generally works in the area of the philosophy of social science and intellectual history to develop and critique theories and policies.

He also collaborates with empirical researchers, using interpretive and critical theories to study Britain in a global context. He has also recently focused on governance and governmentality after neoliberalism and is currently exploring democratic innovation, social inclusion, and multiculturalism.

Vera Kichanova is an urban economist exploring the future of market-based urban development. She completed her PhD dissertation in Political Economy at King’s College London in 2022. Titled Cities as Firms: The Coasian Case for Private Urban Development, her thesis analyses real-life examples of private cities from Honduras to India, looking for economic and legal conditions that make them possible, desirable, and profitable.

In parallel to her academic research, Vera works at Zaha Hadid Architects and at the Free Cities Foundation. Previously, she worked with Atlas Network (US), the London School of Economics (UK), and a number of Eastern European free-market think tanks. At the age of 20, Vera was elected to the Municipal Council in Moscow as an independent non-partisan candidate. After the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, she moved to Kyiv to run an educational media portal covering post-Soviet countries.

Vera’s articles — focused on bridging the gap between urban planning theory and classical liberal thought — were published by The Telegraph, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Spiegel, CapX and FEE.org, among others. She is a commentator on land-use policies for the Adam Smith Institute, the 2013 Democracy Award winner, and a Mont Pèlerin Society member. Vera holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Oxford and a BA in Journalism from Moscow State University.

Robert Reamer is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy. He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2018.  Before coming to King’s College London, he spent two years as a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College.

Poornima Paidipaty is a Lecturer in Comparative Political Economy at King’s College London.  Her work explores the changing history of social and economic inequality, with a particular focus on South Asia. She is currently undertaking a major new research project examining the role of data in economic governance in postcolonial India.  She was previously an LSE Fellow in Inequalities.

Robin Douglass joined the Department of Political Economy in 2012 and he is now Senior Lecturer in Political Theory. He previously studied at the Universities of York and Exeter. His expertise is in the history of modern political thought and he is especially interested in assessing how interpretations of historical thinkers continue to influence and structure debates in contemporary political philosophy. He is the author of Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, as well as co-editing a forthcoming volume on Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Robin’s most recent work examines Bernard Mandeville’s impact on eighteenth-century debates about sociability and commercial society, while future plans include a monograph on Mandeville’s political philosophy. Robin is a co-founder and current President of the European Hobbes Society, serves on the board of the Rousseau Association, and is co-editor of the European Journal of Political Theory.

Peter John is Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He is known for his work on agenda-setting, local politics, behavioral interventions, and randomized controlled trials.

He is author of Analyzing Public Policy (2012), which reviews the main theories of public policy and the policy process. He is interested in how best to involve citizens in public policy and management, often deploying behavioural interventions. He tests many of these interventions with randomized controlled trials. Some of these trials appeared in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (Bloomsbury, 2011). Practical issues with the design of experiments are covered in Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017). Experiments are also used to examine the impact of social media and politics in Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2015), with Helen Margetts, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri.

A more general approach to the use of the tools of government to achieve policy change is contained in his Making Policy Work (Routledge, 2011). His most recent book is How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (Edward Elgar).

Dr Christel Koop is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy. Her research interests include delegation theory, arm’s length governance, regulation and regulatory agencies, democratic accountability and legitimacy, and institutional theory.

Christel holds a BA and MPhil degree in political science from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and obtained her PhD degree in political and social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Before joining the department, she was Fellow in Public Policy and Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also co-organiser of the inter-university London Public Policy Seminars.

Christel’s research addresses questions related to the insulation of policy-making from politics and the electoral process, both at the national and the European level. Her work has focused on the determinants of arm’s length governance as well as on its implications for politics, policy outcomes, and democratic accountability and legitimacy.

Dr Gabriel Leon is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. His research focuses on conflict, civil-military relations, institutional development and economic history. Gabriel’s current work examines the causes of riots, how riots spread, and the social and political consequences they have. He also works on gentrification (with a focus on London), the political development of England in the medieval period, and on how the military and popular protest can drive political change.

Before joining King’s, Gabriel was the Bevil Mabey Fellow in Economics at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. He studied applied mathematics at Harvard (BA) and economics at Oxford (DPhil/PhD). Between his degrees, he worked as an associate consultant in the NYC offices of Bain & Company.

Personal website: https://gabrieljleon.wordpress.com/

Anja Shortland is a Reader in Political Economy and has worked at the King’s Department of Political Economy since 2013. She studied Engineering at Oxford and has a PhD in International Relations from LSE. Anja works on the economics of crime and violence, usually with an interdisciplinary approach. Anja’s current research examines the governance of criminal markets. She is particularly interested in the governance of tricky and opaque transactions between legal entities and extra-legal groups such as protection contracts, the trade in hostages, maritime piracy, and stolen art. Her work contrasts the highly effective, polycentric governance architecture created by insurers to stabilize and order these markets with problematic government participation in the economic underworld- e.g. the ransoming of hostages from terrorist groups. Anja has consulted widely on Somali piracy, including for the World Bank. She is currently writing a book on Kidnap for Ransom for Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2018).

John Meadowcroft is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. His research focuses on the threats to free societies – societies in which individual liberty is protected and valued – in the light of the historical evidence that free societies are far less stable than is often assumed. He is presently pursuing this research via ethnographic research into UK far right organisations with his research collaborator Elizabeth Morrow. This involves attending demonstrations held by far right groups around the UK and interviewing participants.

In the past John’s research has focused more on theories of liberty and power, on the ethics and limits of markets, on the generation and destruction of social capital, and on evaluation of economic and political solutions to social problems, notably in healthcare. He is the author of The Ethics of the Market (Palgrave, 2005), co-author with Mark Pennington of Rescuing Social Capital from Social Democracy (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007), and author of an intellectual biography of the founder of public choice theory, James M. Buchanan (Continuum, 2011/Bloomsbury, 2013).

Personal website: https://johnmeadowcroft.net

Paul Sagar read PPE at Balliol College, Oxford before taking an MA in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought from the University of London. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where from 2014-2018 he was Junior Research Fellow in Politics at King’s College.

Paul Sagar works in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. His recent monograph, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the State from Hobbes to Smith, explores Enlightenment accounts of the foundations of modern politics, whilst also addressing contemporary issues regarding how to conceive of the state, and what that means for normative political theory today. He has also published a number of studies on topics such as: the political writings of Bernard Williams, so-called ‘realist’ approaches to political philosophy, the nature of liberty under conditions of modernity, and the idea of immortality. Paul is currently in the early stages of two major new projects. The first is a monograph study of Adam Smith’s political philosophy as rooted in his conceptions of history and commercial society. The second is an exploration of the idea of the enemy in the history of political thought.

As well as his academic writings, Paul also writes for more popular audiences. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Aeon.co, and The Political Quarterly. See his personal website for details.