Christopher Bickerton is Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe
Professor in Modern European Politics and Societies, University of Cambridge
Fellow, Queens’ College, Cambridge

Christopher Bickerton is a Professor in Modern European Politics at POLIS and an Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books and articles that span a number of different fields within social and political science. These include three research monographs, European Union Foreign Policy: From Effectiveness to Functionality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-authored with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti). His 2012 book on state transformation was awarded the Best Book prize by the University Association of Contemporary European Studies. His articles have been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Political Studies, International Politics and the Revue Française de Science Politique. In 2011, he co-edited a special issue in JCMS on the EU’s security and defense policy (with Bastien Irondelle and Anand Menon).

In 2016, he published the best-selling The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide with Penguin, which was submitted for the Baillie-Gifford prize, the UK’s leading non-fiction literary prize. He is currently under contract with Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA for a history of Europe since 1989. Beyond academic publishing, he has written articles for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New York Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and The Big Issue. He is regularly interviewed for national and international radio and has been a panelist on the Talking Politics podcast.

His research interests span the disciplines of international relations, comparative politics and contemporary European history. The focus of his research has long been on the comparative study of state-society relations, looking in particular at dynamics of state transformation in Europe, the relationship between regional integration and the transformation of national political and party systems, and the challenges presented to representative democracy by growing disenchantment with democracy in advanced industrialized societies.

Bickerton obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford (St John’s College) in 2008 and since then has held teaching positions at Oxford, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Sciences Po in Paris.