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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Paul Langley

Professor

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor in the Department of Geography+44 (0) 191 33 41850

Biography

Paul Langley is Professor of Economic Geography. He joined the Department in 2011, and was previously Professor of International Relations at University of York. Paul's Departmental roles have included Deputy Director of Education, Programme Director BA(Hons) Geography, and Convenor of the Economy & Culture research cluster. He is presently Director of Postgraduate Research.

Paul's research interests centre on money and finance. He has published four monographs - World Financial Orders (Routledge, 2002/2013), The Everyday Life of Global Finance (Oxford University Press, 2008), Liquidity Lost (Oxford University Press, 2015), and FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Zone Books/Princeton University Press, 2026).

Paul's research has received support from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), British Academy, and European Commission. He is also Managing Editor of one of the world's leading interdisciplinary journals for social scientists - Economy and Society (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/reso20/current)

Bluesky: @paullangley.bsky.social

Paul's research is presently focused on two spaces of money and finance:

(1) FinTech

Co-authored with Andrew Leyshon, Paul’s most recent monograph - FinTech Capital - was published in 2026 in the Near Futures series of Zone Books, distributed by Princeton University Press. Hear Paul and Andrew talk about the book at https://newbooksnetwork.com/fintech-capital 

FinTech Capital continues Paul's long-standing interest in the transformation of retail financial services (e.g., The Everyday Life of Global Finance, OUP, 2008; Consumption, Markets & Culture, 2014). It develops from his previously published work on digital economies and FinTech (e.g. Finance & Society, 2017; New Political Economy, 2020; Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022), and from research into the digitally mediated payday loan market in the UK (e.g. Cultural Geographies, 2017; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018; Economy and Society, 2019). Paul's current research into FinTech is focused on the introducton of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday payments economies across the globe (Journal of Financial Transformation, forthcoming)

(2) Carbon finance

As part of REINVENT - a Horizon 2020 project with European partners and colleagues from Durham Geography - Paul investigated the emergence of new forms of carbon finance in response to climate change (see Progress in Human Geography, 2019; Economy and Society, 2021). Related work includes a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Financial Geography on 'Impact investors' (2021), and a piece with John Morris (University of Nottingham) on the role of central banks as 'climate governors of last resort' (Environment and Planning A, 2020).

Research into carbon finance extends Paul's research into governmental processes that variously seek to secure the future of life via financial logics, techniques and practices. See, for example: a book-length treatment of how these processes were at the heart of the governance of the global financial crisis (Liquidity Lost (OUP, 2015); an article on the financialization of the urban infrastructures of life (Economic Anthropology, 2018); and, a conceptual essay arguing for wide-ranging research into 'The financialization of life' (in International Handbook of Financialization, 2020, edited by Mader, Mertens & van der Zwan). 

Cutting across his research into spaces of money and finance, Paul contributes to theoretical debates underway in economic geography, economic sociology, and beyond. This includes interest in the strengths and limitations of processual concepts (e.g. marketization, valuation, assetization, platformization, capitalization) (e.g. Environment and Planning A, 2020; Review of International Political Economy, 2020); the ways in which Economics can be understood to have affective, performative and governmental power; and, how the making of economic subjectivities features in processes of economic change.

Supervises

Paul welcomes doctoral research students interested in working on topics that fall broadly within the remit of his research interests. He has previously supervised students who have written theses on a wide range of topics, including: occupational pensions in the UK; sub-prime mortgage markets in the US and UK; ‘small states’ and ‘hot money’ in the global economy; financial stability and central banking; the rise of the US dollar as 'world money'; fiscal austerity and everyday life; private wealth management; urban air rights markets; distributed ledger technology and cross-border payments; stock market listings by Chinese firms; the making of carbon markets in China; and central bank digital currencies in China. Paul is presently supervising projects on the Mergers and Acquistions industry in the City of London; prediction markets in the United States, youth cultures of speculation in China, and the algorithms and data of alternative credit scoring in FinTech firms in the UK.  

In 2021, Paul received the University-wide Teaching and Learning Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Research Student Supervision. 

Research interests

  • Geographies of money and finance
  • Financialization
  • FinTech
  • Private Equity

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

  • Platform Economies
    Langley, P., & Nowak, S. (in press). Platform Economies. In H. W. Yeung, S. Hall, & J. P. Poon (Eds.), The Springer Handbook of Economic Geography. Springer.
  • Impact investors: The ethical financialization of development, society and nature
    Langley, P. (2021). Impact investors: The ethical financialization of development, society and nature. In J. Knox-Hayes & D. Wojcik (Eds.), Routledge handbook of financial geography. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351119061
  • The financialization of life
    Langley, P. (2020). The financialization of life. In P. Mader, D. Mertens, & N. van der Zwan (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of financialization. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315142876-6
  • Financial flows: Spatial imaginaries of speculative circulations
    Langley, P. (2017). Financial flows: Spatial imaginaries of speculative circulations. In B. Christophers, A. Leyshon, & G. Mann (Eds.), Money and finance after the crisis : critical thinking for uncertain times. (pp. 69-90). John Wiley and Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119051374.ch3
  • The ethical investor and embodied economies.
    Langley, P. (2010). The ethical investor and embodied economies. In R. Abdelal, M. Blyth, & C. Parson (Eds.), Constructing the International Economy. Cornell University Press.
  • Consumer credit, self-discipline, and risk management.
    Langley, P. (2009). Consumer credit, self-discipline, and risk management. In G. Clark, A. Dixon, & A. Monk (Eds.), Managing Financial Risks: From Global to Local. (pp. 280-300). Oxford University Press.

Journal Article

Supervision students

Cecilia Prichard Jones

Research Postgraduate (MRes)

Maisy Ekins-Malcolm

Owen Riley

Research Postgraduate (PhD)

Zhihao Xiong