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Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations
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Dr Alexander Stoffel, BA (Oxford), MSc (LSE), PhD (QMUL)

Alexander

Lecturer in International Politics

Email: a.w.stoffel@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne 2.16
Website: https://www.alexanderstoffel.com
X: @StoffelAlex

Profile

I joined the Department of Politics and IR as a Lecturer in International Politics in September 2023. I was previously a Fellow in Qualitative Methodology at the London School of Economics. My research takes up critical questions regarding the intersections of sexuality, race, and desire within capitalist expansion.

My first monograph, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States, published by Stanford University Press in 2025, reconsiders US-based struggles for sexual freedom since the 1960s. It centers their transnational practices and infrastructures and derives from this history new perspectives on contemporary debates about queerness, capital accumulation, and empire.

I am currently an editor of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, where I co-convene the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Struggles Stream.

For a CV and further information, visit my website.

Office hour booking link

Undergraduate Teaching

POL3003 – Gender, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Sem A)
POL271 – Qualitative Methods for Social Science Research (Sem B)
POL274 – Gender and Feminisms in World Politics (Sem B)

Research

Research Interests:

  • Queer, gender, and trans studies
  • Marxist theory
  • International Relations
  • Critical methodologies
  • Social movement history
  • Psychoanalysis

Examples of research funding:

My doctoral research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Stoffel, Alexander. 2025. “End of the Rainbow: Sex, Empire, and the New Right.” rs21, 14 August.
Stoffel, Alexander. 2025. “Empire Unmasked: Struggles for Gender and Sexual Freedom in an Era of US Imperial Crisis.” Historical Materialism Online, 25 March.
Stoffel, Alexander. 2024. “What’s Left of the Bourgeois Family? On Family Abolition.” rs21, 22 December.

Stoffel, Alexander and Ida Roland Birkvad. 2023. “Abstractions in International Relations: On the Mystification of Trans, Queer, and Subaltern Life in Critical Knowledge Production.” European Journal of International Relations 29 (4), 852-876.

Stoffel, Alexander. 2022. “The Dialectic of the International: Elaborating the Historical Materialism of the Gay Liberationists.” International Studies Quarterly 66 (3), 0-12.

Stoffel, Alexander. 2021. “‘Homocapitalism’: Analytical Precursors and Future Directions.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (1), 173-178.

Stoffel, Alexander. 2018. “The Challenge of Unintelligible Life: Critical Security Studies’ Failure to Account for Violence Against Queer People.” Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science 38, 48-63.

Other publications

Stoffel, Alexander. 2024. “Seductions of the Nation-State: On Anti-Trans Feminism and Other Sexual Nationalisms.” Salvage, Issue 14 (Spring/Summer), 139-149.

Stoffel, Alexander and Ida Roland Birkvad. 2023. "Against Mystification, or What Went Wrong with Critical IR." E-International Relations, 25 August.

Stoffel, Alexander. 2022. “Sexual Freedom.” Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) Website.

Stoffel, Alexander. 2018. “International Relations Theory Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be… Better.” E-International Relations, 31 July.

Supervision

I welcome applications from candidates interested in working on gender, sexuality, imperialism, Marxism, histories of political struggle, or related fields.

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