About the speaker

Dr Maxine David is a Lecturer in the Institute for History, Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University. She is a foreign policy analyst, specialising in EU-Russia relations. As a former member of the European Commission funded EU-Russia Expert Network (EUREN), Maxine works with the European Commission today as a Senior Non-Key Expert for its Public Diplomacy Project: Russia. She has published widely on the EU-Russia relationship, as well as being contributor to and co-editor of three seminal collections: The Routledge Handbook on EU-Russian Relations: Structures, Actors, Issues; Modernisation in EU-Russian Relations: Past, Present and Future; National Perspectives on Russia: European Foreign Policy in the Making?. She is currently working on three further co-authored works, examining emotions in EU foreign policy in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine; on the question of whether the EU has matured as a foreign policy actor; and on the challenges of knowledge co-production across the EU-Russia divide.

Maxine is also a dedicated educator and often speaks at conferences about the relationship between teaching and research, and social realities and how they (should) impact our teaching and research. Other co-authored publications reflect this: Disrupting and Re-imagining European Studies: towards a More Diverse and Inclusive Discipline”; “Nakedly Normative: A Feminist (Re-)Imagination of Planetary Politics”; and “Reclaiming agency: skills, academics and students in the Social Sciences”.