A very short academic autobiography

I graduated from Clark University ( Worcester , Mass. ) in 1988 with a BA in Geography (including 6 months at the Université de Bourgogne in France (formerly the Université de Dijon). I then spent more than a year teaching in Paris in 1988-1989, and returned to the US to study for an MS. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I finished my Masters Degree on “Growth Machine Theory and Urban Political Decline: a case study of the Madison South Beltline Highway , Madison , Wisconsin . After finishing my Masters degree in 1991, I went to pursue my D.Phil (PhD.) at the University of Oxford , working with David Harvey and Erik Swyngedouw. During the years of writing my dissertation (interspersed with over a year of fieldwork in Paris ), I accepted a Lectureship (Assistant Professorship) at the University of Liverpool in October 1994. I later completed my doctorate in 1997 entitled “The Production and Regulation of North African Immigrants in the Paris automobile industry, 1970-1990”. Five years later, in 2002, I left Liverpool, to take up another Lectureship at the University of Nottingham . I was promoted to a Senior Lectureship (Associate Professor) in 2005 and after 15 years in England , moved back to the United States to accept a job at the University of Kentucky in August 2006. I am currently co-editor of the journal Geoforum,and I have been appointed as a ‘Special Associate Professor’ at the University of Nottingham (UK) from September 2007..

Research and Teaching Interests

My principal interests lie in economic and urban geography, but particularly in the political-economic and urban dimensions of immigration. I have also conducted research on issues relating to "globalization", (informal) work and labor markets, questions of multi-culturalism, and latterly Islamic banking.

I have studied these issues in the context of the European Union, and especially France, although I am also concerned with comparative aspects of economic development and urbanization, especially between the EU and the United States.

Papers in progress:

“International Division of Labor, or International Labor Market Segmentation”? Submitted to Economic Geography

Book chapters forthcoming

(2007)  Labour markets: at the heart of ‘migration management’, in Pellerin, H., and Gabriel, C. Governing International Labour Migration. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

(2007) Workfare and the study of economic geography, in Lee, R., Leyshon, A., McDowell, L., and Sunley, P. (eds.) A Compendium of Economic Geography. London : Sage, forthcoming.

Selected Recent Publications:

(with Jane Pollard) (2007) Islamic banking and finance: postcolonial
political economy and the decentring of economic geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32: 313-330.

Samers, M (2005) "The 'underground economy', immigration and economic development in the European Union: An agnostic-skeptic perspective", International Journal of Economic Development, Vol 6, No. 2, pp199-272 [view online]

Samers, M. (2003) (with Castree, N., Coe, N., and Ward, K.) Spaces of Work: global capitalism and geographies of labour. London: Sage

Samers, M. (2003) "Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented immigration in France", Economy and Society, 32, pp. 555-583.

Samers, M. (2002) "Immigration and the global city hypothesis: towards an alternative research agenda", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26, pp. 389-402.