Biography

Dr. Arianna Tassinari is a comparative political economist specialised in the politics of industrial relations, labour market regulation and social policy. She received her PhD in Industrial Relations from the University of Warwick in late 2019, and from October 2020 she will join the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany as a Senior Researcher.

After receiving her BA in Politics and Development Studies at SOAS, University of London and an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, Arianna worked as an applied policy researcher in Ireland and the UK before embarking on her doctoral studies. During her PhD, she held visiting positions at the University of Milan (Italy), at ISCTE-IUL (Portugal), and at University College Dublin (Ireland).

Arianna’s main research interests include the comparative political economy of work, employment and industrial relations; the role of organised interest groups in the political sphere; the sociology of unions and labour movements; and the impact of technological change on labour relations. Her research has appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals and edited books.

As a Max Weber Fellow, Arianna is focusing on publishing peer-reviewed articles and writing a book proposal based on her PhD thesis on the puzzling resilience of corporatist forms of policymaking in the aftermath of the Eurocrisis. She is also developing a new research agenda on the political economy of post-crisis growth strategies in the Eurozone periphery and of the social blocs underpinning them.

Arianna has taught several undergraduate courses at the University of Warwick on political research methods and comparative employment relations, winning various awards for teaching excellence, and has taught as a guest lecturer on industrial relations and political economy for postgraduate students at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy) and at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic).

Whilst at the EUI, Arianna is involved in several extra-curricular endeavours. She co-convenes the Florence Labour Politics Reading Group, a joint bottom-up study group between the EUI and the Scuola Normale Superiore; she is an active member of the research collective ‘Il Cantiere delle Idee’, dedicated to conducting critical, public-facing sociological and political research on Italian society; and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Observatory on Cohesion and Social Inclusion (OCIS).