Posted on 19 June 2018
“The 2008 global financial crisis hit big time and I realized I didn’t understand anything about it. I never paid much attention to the economic pages in the mainstream newspapers,” says Cleo Davies, this year’s UACES grant winner, about what originally inspired her to research banking regulation and supervision.
Following initial work done with her university’s history department, Davies, PhD candidate in politics at the University of Edinburgh, is using her expertise to examine the EU-UK relationship through the prism of the integration of banking regulation and supervision.
Davies recently received a research grant to consult primary sources at the Historical Archives of the European Union, fully funded by the Academic Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES). UACES offers an annual grant of £1300 for early career researchers in the field of European Studies to carry out archival research at the Historical Archives.
“I think the people have been very nice, very helpful and very professional. You really become a member of the place, you’re not just on the outside,” says Davies about her stay at the archives.
Her visit is proving fruitful, as she is getting a better overview on financial supervision at European level. “They have some really interesting individual holdings. I’m now going through the former Commissioner for Competition, Peter Sutherland’s notes. That is quite interesting because you get an insight into the cabinet discussions and the meetings of the heads of cabinets,” she adds.
The research gathered during her visit will inform a section in a paper, which focuses on the second half of the 1980s. It aims to shed light on the interaction and tensions that derive from different political projects for the European Union: whether the completion of a Single Market was thought as a building block or not for an Economic and Monetary Union.
Davies will be presenting her research at the Annual Graduate Conference organized by the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre on 10-12 September 2018. As a part of the UACES grant, she will also be organizing a panel and presenting her research, which stems from HAEU archival sources, at the 2019 UACES Annual Conference in Lisbon.