Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE. She is the author of Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (Yale University Press, 2001) and her current manuscript, Late Soviet Britain: The Political Economy of State Failure in the Materialist Utopias is currently under review with Cambridge University Press. She has published widely on issues of party-state development and state capture in Central Europe, and, more recently, on the political economy of the neoliberal state in the UK. Her work has appeared in The Review of International Political Economy, Comparative Politics, The Journal of Common Market Studies, East European Politics and Societies and Current History, and numerous LSE blogs. Abby joined the EI in 1997. She was also a Visiting Fellow at MIT (1995-1997) and a Jean Monet Fellow at the European University Institute (2001-2002). She held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship from 2017-2018 (a serious illness, happily recovered from, had meant a break in work between 2005-2009).
Over the years Abby has taught MSc Courses on the Varieties of Capitalism, the Political Economy of Europe, and the Comparative Political Economy of Central Europe. Based on her post-2016 research she teaches a new course on the Political Economy of the Neoliberal State, which examines the affinities between the Soviet and neoliberal political economy of the state. She was awarded an LSE Teaching Prize in 2002 and an LSE/ASRC Excellence in Education Award in 2020; she won the European Institute Departmental Teaching Prize in 2011 (with Spyros Economides), 2013 and 2015. In the LSE Student Union Student-Led Teaching Excellence Awards she was a Nominee in 2014 and 2020, a Commended Nominee in 2015 and a Highly Commended Nominee in 2016 and 2019. She is currently the Teaching Chair of the European Institute.
Research Interests
The political economy of Central Europe; models of development in emerging markets; the development of party state ties in Central Europe; comparative materialist utopias; the political economy of the Soviet Union; the political economy of neoliberalism; varieties of capitalism; financialization; the political economy of climate change.