Jose Tomas Labarca is Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences, and Bye-Fellow at St Edmund’s College. He is also an Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow in British politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Cambridge.

Jose Tomas’ academic background is interdisciplinary, combining degrees in History and Sociology. He received his PhD in Sociology from The University of Edinburgh. In 2023, his PhD was awarded with the Political Studies Association’s Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.

His current research agenda looks at the political economy of the state, government elites, expert knowledge, and economic policymaking in the UK. His book project reconstructs pivotal transformations in British budget politics and macroeconomic institutions in the 1960s-1980s and offers counter-intuitive insights that complicate existing models of broad-ranging political-economy changes, neoliberalism, and austerity politics.