Postgraduate students

We encourage our graduate students to engage in original supervised research. In addition, our staff are encouraged to include high-performing graduate students in their research teams. The resulting scholarly interchange among staff and students makes for an energetic and exciting research environment.

Following is a list of staff members and the postgraduate research topics they are most interested in supervising.
 

• Assoc Prof Stephen Hoadley
  Within the broad field of International Relations, Prof Hoadley is most interested in the sub-discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis. He finds most satisfying intellectually, and most feasible for graduate student research, the exploration of why particular governments pursue particular foreign policies, including not only the international but also the domestic institutions and influences shaping those policies.
   
• Dr Geoff Kemp
  Geoff Kemp is interested in supervising research projects addressing themes in media, political thought and the history of ideas, especially those relating to censorship, toleration and the relationship of media, journalism and public opinion to politics, democracy and revolutions, past and present.
  
  He is always interested in listening to expressions of interest and the potential field is wide: recent postgraduate supervision has ranged from studies of the early modern thinkers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes to concepts of justice, post-9/11press coverage and political blogging.
   
• Dr Anita Lacey
  Dr Lacey is willing to supervise postgraduate students in the area of global politics and governance, development and poverty reduction, human security, international organisations (UN, World Bank, IMF) and global civil society.
  
  In particular, Dr Lacey suggests the following research topics for potential MA or PhD students: human security and critical security studies; United Nations Development Programme; poverty reduction and development aid; resistances to neoliberal globalization; coalitions of development non-governmental organizations; structures and practices of global governance; case-studies of global governance from a governmentality framework.
   
• Dr Jennifer Lees-Marshment
  Dr Lees-Marshment will supervise research in the areas of parties, elections, parliaments, interest groups, consultation, participation, deliberative democracy, e-government, leadership and political marketing (e.g. market research, segmentation, political consumers, branding, market-oriented parties, positioning, strategy, marketing members and volunteers, government communication, public relations, e-marketing, delivery management).
   
• Dr Katherine Smits
  Dr Smits’s research focuses on the general fields of contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. She has particular interests in liberalism - contemporary and historical - identity politics, multiculturalism, nationalism, deliberative democracy and feminist theory.
  
  Dr Smits is interested in working with students from the BA Hons dissertation level to PhDs, who have had some background in undergraduate theory courses. She welcomes students interested in working on problems or issues in either contemporary or historical theory, as well as those who wish to do theoretically informed empirical work in any of the areas listed above.
  
  Several projects she has supervised apply aspects of contemporary theory on race, ethnicity or gender to social or ethnic groups in the New Zealand or comparative contexts.

• Professor Gerald Chan
  Gerald Chan has a disciplinary interest in International Relations and an area interest in Chinese foreign policy. He enjoys exploring the relationship between international relations on the one hand and Chinese foreign policy on the other, in theoretical terms as well as in empirical study. This interest of his has led him to investigate Chinese participation in international organisations, Chinese views on international relations, China’s compliance with global norms and rules, and most recently China’s engagement with global governance.

He would like to supervise students to work on China’s contributions to the setting of global agenda; the making of rules; rule implementation, enforcing, and monitoring; and the settlement of disputes arising from conflicts of interest amongst states.

For more information see our recent Phd thesis topics page.