Isabelle researches party politics in Germany, Britain, France, and the European Union. She is the director of King’s Centre for German Transnational Relations. Isabelle joined King’s in September 2016, having previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. In May 2024, Isabelle was appointed co-editor of Government and Opposition, an International Journal of Comparative Politics.

Isabelle holds a PhD in European politics from Royal Holloway (University of London) and a MA in European Political and Administrative Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges. She did her undergraduate degree in Political Science, French and Italian at the Universities of Trier and Erlangen-Nürnberg and spent an Erasmus year studying French politics at Sciences Po Bordeaux.

Research

Isabelle is an expert on political parties in Germany, the UK, France, and at the EU level. Her research is comparative in nature and draws primarily on qualitative research methods, using elite interviews, surveys, participant observation.

Isabelle’s research focuses on:

• National and European parties and gender, and in particular, women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s representation
• Party organisation (intra-party democracy and the power of members)
• Party policies and discourses
• Europarties and their organisational and ideological development
• Social Democratic parties and the European Union
• Far-right parties and gender
• German and French EU politics

Isabelle’s research has been published in a 2018 monograph entitled Centre-left parties and the European Union (Manchester University Press) in which she compared how the Labour Party, the French Socialists and the German Social Democrats deal with the challenges of EU membership. She has also published her research in journals such as Party Politics, Government and Opposition, The Journal of European Integration, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, German Politics and Society.

Isabelle has co-edited the 10^th edition of Politics UK (Routledge, 2022), for which she wrote a chapter entitled ‘Gender and British Politics’. She is currently preparing the 11^th edition.

Teaching

Isabelle teaches on a variety of undergraduate modules, such as British Politics, European Gender Politics, and Comparative European Politics.

In the past she has also taught modules on the European Union, Britain and the European Union, Political Analysis, Research Methods, and the Welfare State in Europe.

PhD Supervisions

Isabelle has supervised seven PhD students to completion and would welcome applications in the following research areas:

• Political parties in Europe: organisation, policies, discourses, strategies
• Women and LGBTQ+ people’s representation in politics
• The European Parliament: elections, internal politics and policies
• Europarties
• British, German, and French politics

Expertise and public engagement

Isabelle has appeared live on Sky News to speak about German elections and British EU politics.

Isabelle has also given an interview on BBC 4. In addition, she has written pieces for The Conversation on German politics, done a podcast for The UK in a Changing Europe on the 2021 German elections, written a piece for the LSE’s Brexit blog and the PSA’s Political Insight blog (on the British Labour Party).