Dr. Maddalena Procopio holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Her thesis is a comparative study of how the interactive effects of state and social agents in Kenya impact the country’s relations with China across sectors (trade, healthcare, education). She is currently Associate Tutor at the Politics and International Studies department (PAIS), at the University of Warwick, where she is teaching two modules on Africa, and undertaking supervision of UG dissertations.

Before joining PAIS she worked as a Research Officer in the Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development from June to December 2016. She was a visiting scholar at Peking University between February and May 2016, where she worked within the Centre for African Studies on Kenya-China trade union links. She was associate researcher from 2012 to 2015 at the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, working on the project “Chinese and African Spaces of Interaction”. In that capacity, Maddalena conducted research on Chinese soft power in Africa, focusing specifically on Confucius Institutes in South Africa. She was also associated with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi, from 2013 to 2014, where she conducted research for her PhD thesis. Maddalena taught courses on “Foreign Policy Analysis” and “Africa and Emerging Powers” at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town between 2012 and 2014, and was Co-Director of the first LSE Africa Summit in 2014, which paved the way for the set-up of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, launched in 2016.