Aila Trasi

Teaching Fellow

Study Skills Lead

Email:

Room: E1.24

Advice & Feedback Hours:

Wednesday 13:30-14:30
Thursday 14:30-15:30
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Profile

I joined Warwick in 2025 as a Teaching Fellow in International Political Economy. I completed my PhD in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD, USA) in July 2025. In 2024/25 I was a visiting researcher at Goethe University, Frankfurt, at the Chair of International Political Economy, while completing my dissertation titled "Making State Projects: Analyzing Embedded Neoliberal Transitions In Malaysia and Thailand".

My research broadly focuses on the evolving relationship between states, markets and society in the Global South, which I approach from a Neo-Gramscian perspective. I am also interested in studying the interaction between domestic bureaucrats and International Organizations, and the inner workings of the latter as "pathological" bureaucracies. Lastly, I am interested in the politics of (macro-)economic measurement, especially the contruction of GDP and productivity measures. I research this last topic with a strong interdisciplinary approach, merging insights from Political Economy, Economic Sociology, and Critical Accounting.

Teaching and Supervision

In 2026/27 I am convening PO133 (Foundation of Political Economy) and PO2E4 (International Political Economy of Everyday Life), and I also teach seminars in PO230 (International Political Economy: States, Markets, and Global Capitalism). I am available to supervise undergraduate dissertations on any aspect of Political Economy broadly (and/or tangentially) related to my research interests. I am also happy to supervise work on the topics of Public Policy in the Global South, Postcolonial/Decolonial approaches to Development, The Politics of Measurement, Critiques to Economic Growth, and IR Theory (including meta-theoretical debates).

Read my latest publication for free here (if the open access link is expired and your institution does not have free access to the journal, please email me and I'll send you a copy): 

Trasi, Aila. "Polycentric Neoliberalism in Thailand: Crisis, Sufficiency, and the Expansion of Populist Welfare.Link opens in a new window" Global Perspecives 7, no. 1 (2026): 170232