Alexandra Hennessy

Dr Alexandra Hennessy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. She serves as Deputy Director of the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis (2024–present) and previously held roles such as Director of Employability (2021–2023). She co-directs the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence and is a member of the EU-Asia Security and Trade (EAST) research group. Her research focuses on European Union politics, EU trade/foreign policies, financial crises, and EU-Indonesia relations, with a particular emphasis on policy implementation and accountability during crises like the euro crisis and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Her book The Europeanization of Workplace Pensions (Cambridge University Press, 2014) explores pension market integration in the EU.

Dr Hennessy holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University and a B.A./M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin. She has published in prestigious journals including Socio-Economic Review, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Common Market Studies. She has received the EUSA Best Dissertation Award (2009) and an honourable mention for Best Paper at the EUSA conference. In 2024, she and Dr Ryan Bakker were awarded the Supervisor of the Year Award for the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Her research teams include the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence and the EAST group. She actively supervises PhD students in European Union Politics and Comparative Political Economy, emphasizing topics such as EU-Indonesia relations and clean energy transitions.