Dr Richard Mole

Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology

Richard Mole Email
r.mole@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8809

Fax
020 7679 8777

I studied German and Russian at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where I also worked at the University's Baltic States Research Unit. After four years working for Credit Suisse in London and Zurich, I began my doctoral studies in 1997 at the London School of Economics. My PhD thesis examined the relationship between national identity and foreign policy in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. After completing my PhD, I was a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, before taking up a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at UCL. I joined SSEES in 2004 as Lecturer in the Politics of Central Europe and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology in 2010.

Research Interests
My research focuses the relationship between identity and power, with particular reference to political legitimacy, international relations, social citizenship and gender/sexuality. I also have a strong interest in migration, diasporic citizenship and social integration as well as in discourse theory and social psychology methodologies. I have a broad interest in Central and Eastern Europe but work primarily on the Baltic States and increasingly on Poland. In 2010 I was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and I am currently a Senior Research Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin.

My edited volume, Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics, was published by Palgrave in 2007. My monograph on The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union: Identity, Discourse and Power in the Post-Communist Transition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will be published by RoutledgeCurzon in April 2012. I have also published articles in Nations and Nationalism, European Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Baltic Studies and Sexually Transmitted Infections.

I recently completed a two-year project on the Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles of London's East Europeans in collaboration with the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV Research of the UCL Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences. The project was funded by the UK Medical Research Council.

In 2009 three colleagues and I set up the UCL Nordic/Baltic Research Group, which has been awarded ESRC funding to run a two-year seminar series on 'The Nordic and Baltic States in the European Political Imagination'.

Teaching and supervision
I teach and contribute towards a range of courses relating to identity and politics:

In the summer of 2009 I was awarded a Provost's Teaching Award for excellence in teaching.

I am supervising or have supervised PhD students working on:

Labour migration from Poland to the EU after May 2004 (completed)
The impact of post-accession Polish immigration wave on the existing Polish community in the UK (completed)
Minority rights and nationalisms in Croatia (completed)
Representing discontinuity: the politics of re-narration in Hungary's post-communist democracy, 1989-2006
The influence of teachers and peers on the choice of acculturation strategies and ethnic identification: a study of adolescents in Russian-language schools in Riga
The gendered state of exception in the Croatian nationalist struggle
Argumentation in political discourse and economic processes in post-communist Hungary
Migration, identity and culture: an investigation into the impact of migration on Poles in the UK

Recent Publications

This page last modified Thursday 5 January 2012.