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Research Fellow, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Stephanie is a political and economic sociologist whose research centres on the historical study of culture, democratic politics, economic policy, and the constitution of political authority. Her work deals with both the national and transnational levels (Western countries and the European Union). She is especially interested in the relationship between parties, states, and knowledge production in the late postwar ‘neoliberal’ period, as well as the consequences of that relationship for democratic politics and policy-making. Stephanie’s work thus brings an emphasis on culture, knowledge, and science to bear on our understanding of political economy.

Stephanie’s work seeks to shed light on specific dilemmas of present-day governance: how modern political authority has been built on the back of scientific authority, how those processes have fed into the current political and economic moment, and why in recent decades the relationship between politics and scientific knowledge has shown signs of strain. One of the implications of her work is that, while today’s politics require scientific input, the relationship between politics and science is variable, fragile, and–under certain conditions – can generate alienated publics, disconnected political leadership, and a narrowing of political capacity to anticipate, interpret, and respond to crises.
Stephanie completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute (Max Weber Programme) and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG). She is presently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science History, and the Socio-Economic Review. Her current book manuscript, Neoliberal Politics, offers an account of the causes and longer-term effects of the “third way” era in center-left politics in Western democracies.

Experience

  • –present
    Research Fellow, SPERI, University of Sheffield