Dr Lucia Pradella

Lucia Pradella studied Philosophy, Social Sciences and Migration Studies at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She collaborated with the project of historical-critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s complete works at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. After completing her PhD on globalisation and the history of political economy using that edition (jointly at the University of Naples Federico II and Paris X Nanterre), she conducted a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in Sociology of Economic Processes and Work at Ca’ Foscari. She taught in the areas of International Political Economy, Migration, and Welfare Policies at Brunel, SOAS and Ca’ Foscari. She is a Research Associate in the SOAS Department of Development Studies and in the Centre for the Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, and member of the Laboratory for Social Research at Ca’ Foscari. She joined King’s as a lecturer in International Political Economy in 2015.

Research

• International Political Economy
• Labour, Production and Poverty
• Europe in a Changing World
• Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism
• Migration and Racism
• Alternatives to Neoliberalism

Lucia’s research programme is concerned broadly with globalisation and the changing nature of labour and poverty in Europe. One of the main thrusts of her research is to overcome the problems of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. Lucia has published extensively on the theoretical and historical foundations of IPE, on social theory, and on the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. She has also worked on contemporary processes of impoverishment and global economic crisis, with a focus on the working poor and immigration in Western Europe. A third strand of Lucia’s research concerns alternatives to neoliberalism and the crisis. She is currently studying the interrelations between industrial relations and labour conditions in the metalworking sectors in the UK, Germany, Italy, and in developing countries like China. She is also working on Marxism and postcolonial studies, and editing a collection of Italian anti-colonial writings for the Edinburgh University Press Book Series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought.

Teaching

Lucia’s teaching has covered a wide range of subjects: International Political Economy, Social Theory, Empire and Imperialism, Migration and Development, Political Theory, as well as Political Economy of the Welfare State.

At King’s College she teaches:

International Political Economy
International Political Economy: Theories, Methods & Issues 
Political Economy of the Welfare State
Research Methods

PhD Supervision

Lucia welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of her research interests. 

Expertise and public engagement

Lucia has written for The Guardian and popular websites and magazines (e.g., Jacobin, Red Pepper, International Socialism) on contemporary political economy issues.

She is an elected council member of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), and a member of the Council for European Studies, the European International Studies Association (EISA), and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought.

Lucia serves on the editorial boards of Politics: Rivista di studi politici, and the Ca’ Foscari University Press Book Series Society and Social Transformations.

She acted as a reviewer for Critical Sociology (Sage); Economic Thought(World Economics Association); Routledge (Economics and New Frontiers in Political Economy book series); Research in Political Economy (Emerald); International Critical Thought (Routledge).