Dr Tim (Efthimios) Karayiannides

Tim is one of our Research Fellows, and is part of the University's Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS).

Biography

Tim grew up in South Africa’s industrial heartlands, and studied for his BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He then moved to the UK in 2017 for an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, and PhD at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he became the Donaldson Bye–Fellow in International Studies and Politics, before being elected a Research Fellow at Emmanuel. 

Research

In broad terms, Tim's research concerns the history of ideas about development and the legacy of development discourses on contemporary political thinking. His doctoral research focused on the influence of anthropological, sociological and economic ideas about sub–Saharan African societies on thinkers associated with the French and British New Lefts. His conclusions show that, for these thinkers, sub–Saharan African evidence not only provided a window into the pre–capitalist modes of production and the development of capitalism, but was also considered useful for integrating migrant labour and racial discrimination into standard Marxist accounts of exploitation and class formation. He also look at New Left thinkers before the contemporary scholarly interest in decolonisation, and how in the 1960s and 1970s, they were convinced that non–Western contexts and experiences necessitated the wholesale rethinking of inherited conceptual categories.

While at Emmanuel, Tim will be developing two additional lines of study. The first focuses on how sub–Saharan Africa became increasingly marginal within comparative theorising on the academic Left from the 1980s onwards, and the impact that this had on how globalisation was understood at the turn of the twenty–first century. The second will look at how twentieth century discourses of economic development and poverty alleviation have shaped contemporary approaches to the climate emergency. Tim is also interested in the recent history of ideas about corruption.