Professor Sophia Price

Overview

Biography

Sophia Price is the Head of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of International Political Economy. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg.

Prior to joining Birkbeck, Sophia was Head of Politics and International Relations at Leeds Beckett University. She has also worked at the University of Manchester and the Open University.

Sophia’s research focuses on the political economy of international trade and development. As a feminist political economist her work explores the gendered dimension of trade and poverty reduction strategies. She has published a wide range of works on gender and development policy, the EU’s external relations with the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group, EU and UK relations with West Africa, and the political economy of trade and aid policies and policymaking. She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to undertake research on the gendered dimensions of informal cross-border trade in Africa. She was also awarded funding by the British Academy to develop and lead the two writing workshop programmes: Writing and Researching Inequality in Africa. Both programmes supported the academic and career development of early career researchers in Africa, through online and in person workshops, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and mentoring provision. Sophia also co-led the University Association of Contemporary European Studies Network of EU-Africa Research (NEAR) and the British International Studies Association (BISA) Global Politics and Development Working Group.

Web profiles

• Linkedin

Visiting posts

• Visiting Professor, University of Johannesburg,

Honours and awards

• Senior Fellow Higher Education Academy ,

ORCID

0000-0003-4286-1549

Research

Research interests

• Feminist Political Economy
• International Trade
• Development cooperation policy and policymaking
• EU- Africa relations

Research overview

Sophia’s research focuses on the political economy of international trade and development. As a feminist political economist her work explores the gendered dimension of trade and poverty reduction strategies.  She has published a wide range of research in these areas, including publications in the Review of International Political Economy and International Journal of Feminist Politics. 

Sophia has a longstanding research interest in EU-Africa relations, and the EU’s development cooperation framework with the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group (now the Organisation of Africa, Caribbean and Pacific States). She has published widely on these subjects, including publications in Third World Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Journal of Modern African Studies. She has co-edited two edited volumes with Dr Mark Langan (Kings College London) on EU-Africa Relations: Africa-EU Relations in the Samoa Era: Pan-African Agency and the New Scramble for Africa (2025) and Sustainable Development in Africa- EU Relations (2018). 

Research projects

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions external to Birkbeck:

5

Professor Price welcomes applications from prospective PhD students and visiting students wishing to work on topics related to feminist political economy and decolonial analyses of trade, aid and development cooperation policy and policy making; informality and trade; EU-Africa relations; EU-OACPS relations. 

She has supervised various postdoctoral projects on microfinance and gendered development policies ( Nigeria, Uganda), the political agency of female traders in Nigeria and the politics of economic development in rentier states. 

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Gender and Development

Publications

External Repositories

• Orcid