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Professor Allan Williams

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Allan Williams

 

Position

Professor of European Integration and Globalization

Qualifications

Background/Career

Allan studied Economics and Geography at University College Swansea, 1969-72, before going to the LSE where he obtained his PhD in 1975 for a study of social and residential changes in the nineteenth century industrial city. He was also a part time regional course tutor for the Open University in London in this period, and a part time lecturer in the Planning Department at South Bank Polytechnic.

After completing his doctoral thesis, he stayed on at the LSE to work as a Research Fellow on the ‘Change in Urban Britain’ project, funded by the Department of the Environment. Then in 1976-8 he was a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Durham, and it was during this period that he became interested in the political economy of Southern Europe, a theme that became central to much of his research in the following years.

In 1978 he moved to the Geography Department at the University of Exeter, where he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and then, from 1995, Professor of Human Geography and European Studies. During this period he worked at different times on rural housing issues, the political economy of tourism, and international migration/mobility. He maintained his interests in Southern Europe, but from the mid 1990s focussed more on Central Eastern Europe, while also writing on broader themes of European integration. He was Co-Director of the Centre for European Studies 1987-95, and established and co-ordinated its MA in European Studies, 1989-95. He also jointly established an MSc in Tourism, Development and Policy at Exeter in 2000.

He was appointed to the Chair in European Integration and Globalization at London Metropolitan in 2006. He is a member of both the Institute for the Study of European Transformations, and the Working Lives Research Institute.

Allan has also been involved in a range of wider activities in the social sciences. He is an Academician of the Academy of Social Science (http://www.the-academy.org.uk/), and has been a member of several Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) committees including: the Research Grants Board 2001-5, and the ‘One Europe or Several’ Commissioning Panel, 1997-9. He chaired the ESRC/NERC Transdisciplinary Seminars competition in 2005, and is currently a member of the ESRC First Grants Commissioning Panel (http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/opportunities).

He is an Adjunct Professor in the National Centre for Research on Europe, at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he is developing a research programme on European-New Zealand migration (http://www.europe.canterbury.ac.nz/).

Within the Royal Geographical Society with the IBG, he has been Chair of the Annual Conference in 2005, Chair of the Research Groups Sub-Committee, 2004-6, a Member of Research Committee, 2004-6, and a Member of Council, 2005-6. He was awarded the Heath prize of the Royal Geographical Society in 1995 for his research on Europe (http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Research+and+Higher+Education).

Journals. He is co-editor of two journals: European Urban and Regional Studies (http://eur.sagepub.com) and Tourism Geographies (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14616688.asp). And he is a member of the editorial boards of two other journals: Mobilities (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17450101.asp) and Annals of Tourism Research (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/689/description).

 


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Research interests

Allan’s central research interests are the relationships between economic development and mobility. He is particularly interested in international labour migration and return migration, cross-border mobility, and tourism. The substantive focus of this research includes economic transactions, employment, skills and knowledge transfers. He has undertaken research in a number of European countries, but especially in Central Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and the UK. He was recently or is currently engaged in a number of research projects:

Contact details

allan.williams@londonmet.ac.uk

Allan Williams
Working Lives Research Institute
London Metropolitan University
31 Jewry Street
London. EC3N 2EY
Telephone: 020 7320 3042

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Publications

Books

Allan has written or edited, singly or jointly, 22 books including the following:

Selected recent articles

In press, 2006-7
2005
2004
2002
2001
2000

Recent chapters in books

2005
2004
2003
2002
2001

Other Publications

2005
2006