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 inter-state and inter-cultural relations, political legitimacy, migration and social citizenship and, most recently, gender and sexuality. I have a strong interest in discourse - particularly, post-structuralist discourse theory - and in socio-linguistics and social psychology. I have a broad interest in Central and Eastern Europe but work primarily on the Baltic States and Russia and increasingly on Germany, Poland and Brazil. I was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers in 2011 and was Senior Research Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011-12.

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 was published by RoutledgeCurzon in April 2012. My edited volume, Discursive Constructions of Identity in European Politics, was published by Palgrave in 2007. I have published articles and reviews in Nations and Nationalism, European Journal of Social Psychology, Slavonic and East European Review, Sexualities, NORDEUROPA forum, Journal of Baltic Studies and Sexually Transmitted Infections.

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'.

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.

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

I am supervising or have supervised PhD students working on:

Social citizenship of Polish migrants in London: engagement and non-engagement with the British welfare state (completed)
Towards a symmetrical minority citizenship. Group equality in Croatia, 1990-2005 (completed)
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 (completed)
The self and the collective in Croatian national discourse (completed)
Other whites, white Others: East European migrants and the boundaries of whiteness
Gay life and attitudes toward homosexuality in post-Soviet Georgia
Representing discontinuity: the politics of re-narration in Hungary's post-communist democracy, 1989-2006

Recent Publications

This page last modified Tuesday 8 January 2013.