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 Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 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, The London Review of Books 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 also teaches on the Political Economy of the Neoliberal State and (with Bob Hancke) The Political Economy of the Green Transition in Europe. 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; the political economy of the state in emerging markets and advanced capitalist economies; comparative materialist utopias; Soviet economics; neoclassical economics; the political economy of the Soviet Union; the political economy of neoliberalism; varieties of capitalism; financialization; the political economy of the green transition.

Expertise Details

The political economy of the neoliberal state, with particular reference to the UK; Soviet political economy; systemic transitions and paradigm shifts in the political economy; the political economy of the green transition; political economy of post-communist transition and emerging markets.