Niamh Hardiman

Niamh Hardiman is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin.  She graduated with a BA and MA from UCD, before working for a time at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. She was awarded her DPhil by the University of Oxford, where she studied at Nuffield College. She then taught for several years at Somerville College Oxford as a Fellow and Tutor in Politics, before returning to Ireland and to UCD.

Her current research centres on globalization and the economic crisis, with particular reference to Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. These countries may be seen as analogous to North Carolina as a region within the US, because of their economic and development profile relative to the ‘core’ European economies. Her interests include the challenges of economic governance in the Eurozone, problems of growth in late-industrializing countries, the implications of different modes of interest intermediation in managing problems of production and distribution. She is particularly interested in situating the Irish experience in the context of commonalities and variations in the origins, course, and management of the current European crisis. Among her recent works is a book she has edited, Irish Governance In Crisis, which Manchester University Press is about to publish.

Her other research interests include the politics of fiscal consolidation, which has come to prominence recently in the context of the crisis of the Eurozone. She has ongoing interests in the changing contours of state institutions in relation to markets and civil society organizations, and the implications for policy capacity. She has recently completed a study entitled ‘Mapping the Irish State’ which produced the Irish State Administration Database, around which a new comparative research agenda is starting to develop.