Aine Bennett

Teaching Fellow

Email:

Room: E1.25

Advice and feedback hours: Tuesdays 12:30-13:30 (in E1.25) and Wednesdays 09:30-10:30 (S0.42) - term time only, excluding reading week.

Please book a slot.

Profile

I am a Teaching Fellow in Politics and International Studies. I recently submitted my PhD thesis at Royal Holloway, University of London. I completed my MA in International Security at the University of Warwick in 2020, following an MA(Hons) in French and International Relations from the University of St Andrews.

Research

My PhD research focused on bisexual+ people seeking asylum in the UK and France. I am curious more generally about how sexuality and gender affect (in)security and have previously worked on LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. More generally, I am interested in queer and feminist international relations and critical migration studies. The questions raised in such areas are necessarily also political and social, and during the PhD, I was an active member of the Doing International Political Sociology PhD seminar series. From 2018-2021 I worked on the Border Narratives project at Warwick.

Teaching

In 2025-26, I am teaching seminars on the modules PO107: Introduction to Politics, PO102: Political Research in the 21st Century and PO135: Exploring International Security.

I am supervising final year undergraduate dissertations this year and can supervise any topics in International Relations and International Security. I am particularly interested in hearing from students interested in working on gender, sexuality or migration.

At Royal Holloway, I was a seminar tutor for the modules PR2460: Politics Outside the West (2022-2024) and PY2900: Race, Gender and Queer Philosophy (2022).

Impact

In 2024, I co-ran a project with Vicky Gerrard and Lizzie Hobbs working with frontline migration support services on how to better navigate issues around gender and sexuality in their work. We ran two workshops and produced a training workbook.

This project was supported by funding from Royal Holloway’s ESRC Social Sciences Impact Accelerator and by Migrants’ Rights Network. I have also collaborated with Migrants’ Rights Network on a report on "Bisexuality, Biphobia and Migration".

In 2024-2025, I worked on Kaat Smets and James Sloam’s project with local authorities and civil society organisations about how to improve marginalised young people’s political participation. The final report from this project was published recently.

Publications

Bennett, Aine. (2024) ‘Queer Lives during Conflict in Northern Ireland: Deconstructing the “Two Communities” Model’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 26:2, pp. 329-350.

Bennett, Aine and Laura Sjoberg. ‘State Security’, in Security Studies: An Applied Introduction, Norma Rossi and Malte Riemann (eds.) (2024) London: Sage.