Joe Foweraker is Director of the Latin American Centre, Professor of Latin American Politics, and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College. He was Professor of Government at the University of Essex, and served as the Executive Director of the European Consortium for Political Research from 2000-2003. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Pará (Brazil), Gainesville (Florida) and Boulder (Colorado), and a visiting research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington DC) and the Centre for U.S.- Mexican Studies (UC San Diego).
He has carried out extensive field work in Brazil, Spain and Mexico, and has published monographs on these three countries with Cambridge University Press (in 1981, 1989 and 1993). He has also published widely on social mobilization and citizenship rights in Latin America, including books with Pluto Press (1995) and Oxford University Press (1997). In recent years he has pursued comparative research on democracy, publishing a series of articles on the quality of democratic government and editing an encyclopedia of democratic thought (Routledge 2001).
His current interests include democratic constitutions, state theory, and the nature of the democratic systems of Latin America. He is co-author of a textbook titled Governing Latin America (Polity 2003).