Leading migration research centre appoints new director

Leading migration research centre appoints new director

The University of Sussex-based Sussex Centre for Migration Research, one of the UK’s leading research centres on migration, will have a new Director from 1 April 2012.

Professor Paul Statham, a political sociologist currently at the University of Bristol, takes over the Centre from Professor Russell King, who as one of the Centre’s founding directors has been at the helm since its establishment in 1997.

Professor Statham has published more than 50 books and scholarly articles on migration, multiculturalism, citizenship and the European public sphere, including the well-regarded book Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (University of Minnesota Press, 2005, with Ruud Koopmans, Marco Guigni and Florence Passy).

His latest book, The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention (with Ruud Koopmans) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

Professor Statham is no stranger to Sussex, having studied at the University’s School of European Studies for his undergraduate degree in Politics in 1985-89.

He received his doctorate from the European University Institute, then worked at the University of Leeds, and the WZB Science Centre in Berlin, before moving to Bristol in 2006.

He is currently completing a major collaborative research project that compares the ‘lived experiences’ of different groups of Muslim migrants in six European countries of settlement (EurIslam), funded by the Framework 7 programme of the European Union.

He also has a new book, The Politicization of the European Union (with Hans-Jörg Trenz) forthcoming with the publisher Routledge in 2012.

He already collaborates with Sussex Lecturer Ceri Oeppen (Geography) and partners in Norway on the ‘PREMIG’ project on the return of migrants and asylum-seekers to a range of non-European countries, funded by the Norwegian research council.