About
Hi. I am an associate professor of public policy at Leiden University, Netherlands. My area of specialisation is comparative political economy, and my recent research focusses on the interactions between immigration, labour markets and welfare states in a comparative and historical perspective.
My work has been published in a number of specialised journals in the field, such as Socio-Economic Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, European Journal of Political Research and Governance, among others. You can have a look at my publications and my profile on Google scholar. In May 2018, I was awarded a VIDI personal grant (2018-2023) from the Dutch Science Foundation NWO for a project on the relationship between immigration control and welfare state development. Information about this project can be found here. Within this project, I am currently writing a book provisionally called Welfare States, Closed Borders under contract with Oxford University Press.
Before joining Leiden University, I was a lecturer (Assistant professor) in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. I have held positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, the European University Institute in Florence and the University of Amsterdam. In June 2010, I earned my PhD in Politics at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) , where I grew up. I hold Swiss and Portuguese citizenships, and I speak French, English, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch.
I occasionally blog here and tweet here. My research or commentary have been reported in outlets such as Science, the Times Higher Education, the New York Times, The Nation, Slate, El Paìs, and Mediapart. My writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, CNN and Jacobin, among others. I am usually happy to answer media enquiries.
Alexandre Afonso 