Dr. Thomas Purcell

Biography

Tom joined the Department of European & International Studies at King’s College in September 2019. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester (2010) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2013), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, at the Open University of Catalonia’s (UOC) Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab). From 2013-2015, he served as the Deputy Director at the National Strategy Centre for Right Territory (CENEDET) located at the state postgraduate university (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales) in Quito, Ecuador. Before his current role, Tom spent several years as a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Leeds Beckett University. His research interests include Global Political Economy, Development Studies, Agrarian Studies, Financialisation, and Urban Political Economy. Tom's work primarily examines political economies of development in Latin America, the relationship between value and rent in global agricultural commodity chains, and the financialisation of cities and urban infrastructure. He is particularly interested in applying a Marxian critique of political economy to analyze production and appropriation of value in the global economy, with a focus on issues emerging from the Global South. Tom is currently working on a monograph synthesizing a decade of research experience related to Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, tentatively titled 'Rentier Revolution: Rise and Fall of 21st Century Socialism in Venezuela'.

Research Interests

Experience