Tony Payne

Tony Payne joined the Department in 1985 and was promoted to Professor in 1993. He was Chairman of the Department between 1992 and 1995 and again between 1998 and 2001. He was the Director of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) from 1996 to 1999 and Co-Director from 2002 to 2004. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Social Sciences from June 2008 until August 2012. He is now co-director (with Colin Hay) of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).

He read history and social and political science at Cambridge and subsequently studied at the University of the West Indies and at Manchester from where he received his PhD. He worked at Huddersfield before coming to Sheffield. His principal research interests are the politics of the Caribbean, international political economy and the politics of development.

He was a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1989, was Hallsworth Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Manchester in 1995-6, was a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick between 1997-2006, and was Chairman of the International Advisory Council of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London between 2002-6.

He was Managing Editor of New Political Economy from 1995 to 2005. He was also Visiting Professor in the Department of Public Administration of City University Hong Kong in May 2005 and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University in January-April 2006.

Current Research:

- 'North-South Relations'. This examines current definitions of, and relations between, 'North' and 'South' in the context of globalisation.

- The Historical Evolution of Theories of Development. This examines the changing meaning attributed to the concept of development from the era of classical social theory to the present.

- 'The Group of 8, the Group of 20 and Global Development' This examines the role played by the G8 and G20 processes and, in particular, their annual heads of government summits, in charting the direction of global development.