I am a Stipendiary Lecturer in Political Theory at Pembroke College, where I teach the history of political thought. My research at Oxford looks into relational theories of power. I work more specifically on Benedict Spinoza as a social and political thinker, and thread his philosophical insight into relational approaches to political and international political theory. In empirical terms, I draw upon these relational perspectives to study Europe as a political, geopolitical and ecological space—particularly its perceptions of bordering. This work has gradually nudged my research away from analysing polities from the top-down and inside out, and increasingly towards probing them from the bottom-up and outside in. My first book attempts the former and was shortlisted for the Jacques Delors Prize. My second hopes to undertake the latter.