Before joining Birmingham in early 2024, Chris held professorial positions in Political Science and Law at Glasgow University and Manchester University. He has also held many guest Professorships outside the UK, including, in Law, the Cátedra Internacional Ministro Celso de Mello (Institute of Public Law, Brasilia) and, in Sociology, the Niklas Luhmann Visiting Professorship in Sociological Theory (University of Bielefeld, Germany). In 2018, he received a Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, awarded in recognition of research that has redefined the research field of the recipient. He has strong interests in legal developments in South America and post-Soviet societies, and he has conducted policy-related research and provided policy consultancy in Russia, Uzbekistan and Brazil. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and has served on the panels of different international research commissions, including the ERC, the European Science Foundation, and national funding bodies in Belgium, Switzerland, Romania and Ireland. When not working, he likes to listen to classical music, to visit art galleries and to go hiking (especially in France).   

Most of Chris’s research in the last fifteen years has been devoted to examining the social foundations of constitutional law, with a particular focus on lines of interaction between national and international law. He uses methods derived from historical sociology to conduct his research in this field. In recent years, he has concentrated on identifying the impact of military events and security policies on constitutional formation in different global contexts. Since 2018, he has written two books on militarism and constitutional law, and he completed a book in 2024 with the title: A Sociology of Post-Imperial Constitutions (Cambridge University Press). This book examines how, in different regions, constitutions have frequently been created as part of a social reaction to military pressures caused by imperialism. Jointly with colleagues at Lund University, he is currently completing a book on recent constitutional reforms in Uzbekistan (University of California Press, forthcoming 2025/26). He is also in the final stages of a book on Critical Theory and the Sociology of Law (Manchester University Press), which revisits his early interest in the Frankfurt School and combines legal and aesthetic inquiry.