Dr Simone Varriale

Before joining Loughborough in 2022, I was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick.

I have published extensively about class, migration, race, globalisation and cultural taste in the monographs Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations (BUP); Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction (Palgrave); and in journals like Sociology, The Sociological Review, Poetics, Current Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Cultural Sociology.

I sit on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Sociology and am Associate Editor for the journal European Societies. I was nominated Sociologist of the Month by the journal Current Sociology in 2020 and co-edited a Special Issue of the journal Poetics in 2019.

Simone has researched how class intersects with hierarchies of nation, ethnicity and race, particularly in the areas of intra-EU migration, cultural tastes and popular music consumption.

He has conducted qualitative, ethnographic and historical research on musical globalization in Italy and on post-2008 Italian emigration, developing conceptual and theoretical innovations in the fields of cultural sociology, music sociology, class analysis, race and ethnicity studies, and migration studies.

Simone is interested in a wide range of social theories. He has used Bourdieu’s class analysis, decolonial and postcolonial theory, intersectionality, actor-network theory and world-system theory (among others). He frequently ends up reading outside sociology (political economy, geography, and cultural and media studies).

Simone teaches on a range of modules at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities focused on Inequality, Globalization, Consumption, Social Theory and Research Methods.

He currently serves as a Sociology External Examiner (UG) for the University of Portsmouth.

Current Postgraduate Research Students

• Iman Khan, "Decolonising the curriculum: Exploring anti-racist and intersectional pedagogies in higher education". Co-supervised with Dr Burçe Çelik and Dr Cristian Tileaga.
• Elif Başak Ürdem, 'Meritocratic Hubris and the Populist Surge: Unraveling Structural Dynamics in Liberal Democracies', Co-supervised with Dr Anthony Kevins
• Haojie Fang, Niche digital blind date corner: finding partners with shared cultural interests in the general social media platform Douban in China, Co-supervised with Dr Katie Coveney

Monographs

Edited Volumes

Journal Articles