Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow

Jose Tomas Labarca is an Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow at POLIS and St Edmund's College. Before coming to Cambridge, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of European and International Studies, King's College London, working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project The Political Economy of Growth Models in an Age of Stagnation.

Jose Tomas' academic background is interdisciplinary, combining degrees in History and Sociology. He received his PhD in Sociology from The University of Edinburgh. In 2023, his PhD was awarded with the Political Studies Association’s Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.

His current research agenda looks at the state, government elites, expert knowledge, and economic policymaking in the UK. His book project reconstructs pivotal transformations in British budget politics and macroeconomic institutions in the 1960s-1980s and offers counter-intuitive insights that complicate existing models of broad-ranging political-economy changes, neoliberalism, and austerity politics.