Maria Villares-Varela

María Villares-Varela is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Prior to her role at Southampton María was a Research Fellow at the Center for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME), University of Birmingham, where she contributed to the Center’s research in the area of migrant and ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Before that she was based at the International Migration Institute (IMI), University of Oxford, where she worked as a Research Officer in the projects ‘The Drivers and Dynamics of High-Skilled Migration’ and ‘The Determinants of International Migration’ (DEMIG). 

Her current research interests relate to: immigrant entrepreneurship; work and employment relation in small firms; family businesses; gendered and class-based experiences of work; high-skilled migration; and Latin American and Southern European migration.