Michael Keith is Director of COMPAS and Co-Director of the University of Oxford Future of Cities programme.
His research focuses on migration related processes of urban change. His most recent work is the monograph China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change (2014) and his next a book for Cambridge University Press, Power, Identity and Representation: Race, Governance and Mobilisation in British Society.
He has experience outside the academy as a politician for twenty years in the east end of London, serving in the 1990s and early 2000s for five years as leader of a London local authority, Chair of the Thames Gateway London Partnership and a commissioner on the Blair government’s response to the 2005 London bombings, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.
He is currently the co-ordinator of the ESRC portfolio of investments and research programme on Urban Transformations.