Dean of Academic Affairs Nicholas Startin has been busy with research-related events on the recent 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum, which was on June 23, 2026.
Dean Startin, who is originally from London, is Associate Professor of International Relations at JCU. He is a former Chair of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies and was co-founder of the association’s Comparative Research Network on Euroscepticism. His research on the UK's relationship with the EU pre- and post-Brexit has been highly cited. In 2020, his 2015 article "Have we reached a tipping point? The mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in the UK" in the International Political Science Review (IPSR) was shortlisted for the prestigious International Political Science Association (IPSA) Meisel Laponce Award for the best article between 2015-2019. In this article, he predicted the Brexit referendum result.
In the context of the 10th anniversary of the referendum, Dean Startin recently appeared as a guest in the first of a three-part series focused on the UK’s relationship with the EU on the UK-based Political Dispatch podcast: How Brexit Happened Part 1: The Road to Vote Leave. In this first episode, Dean Startin contextualizes the UK’s relationship with the EU in historical terms.
At the end of June, Dean Startin participated in a conference organized by the Centre for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris titled 10 Years After the Brexit Referendum: Euroscepticism and Europhilia in the UK. Here, he gave the co-authored paper “Contextualizing Brexit and its impact ten years on from the referendum: the next generation of UK voters and their attitudes and perceptions towards the EU.” The findings of the paper were based on a survey he conducted last year of 16–18-year-old high school students in two demographically contrasting English schools.
Related to this, Dean Startin also recently submitted the article “The Elephant in the Room: The Conservative Party and Declining Generation Z Support” to the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique - French Journal of British Studies for a forthcoming Special Issue entitled “The British Conservative Party at the Crossroads.” He has also been invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference in January 2027 on the UK’s relationship with the EU at the University of Lyon. Finally, he is also co-editing the second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Euroscepticism, which is due for publication in Spring 2027.
