Simon Lightfoot is Senior Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Leeds. Before he came to Leeds since 2005, Simon Lightfoot worked at Liverpool John Moores University, and has been a visiting fellow at the National Europe Centre, Australian National University and the Corvinus University of Budapest. In 2009 he won the Political Studies Association’s Bernard Crick Prize for Outstanding Teaching and was awarded a full University Teaching Fellowship. In 2013 Simon won the prestigious award of National Teaching Fellow. and author of Europeanising Social Democracy: The Rise of the Party of European Socialists (Routledge, 2009).