Julien Migozzi, Ph.D.
I am an economic and urban geographer, currently an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. In 2024-2025, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative at UC Berkeley, invited by Professor Marion Fourcade.
My research interests lie at the intersection of financial geography, urban studies, and economic sociology. I examine how digital capitalism reshapes cities and markets, questioning theoretical boundaries and empirical connections between the Global North and the Global South.
My current research project investigates how the rise of platform capitalism reshapes housing markets and inequalities in South Africa. More specifically, I examine how the PropTech industry, through the entanglement of financial capital with digital property technologies, reconfigures value chains and patterns of urban segregation in emerging cities profoundly shaped by racial capitalism.
I use mixed-methods that combine long-term ethnographic fieldwork with spatial data science, leveraging computational tools, spatial analysis, and data vizualisation to measure and locate how financial capital anchors in space, while conducting expert interviews to capture the social construction of markets and data.
At Oxford, I was previously a Research Associate in Finance and Geography on the ERC-funded project “Cities in Global Financial Network”. I am a coauthor of the forthcoming Atlas of Finance, published by Yale University Press. From 2017-2021 I was a Lecturer in the Departmentt of Geography at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
I am a former student (élève normalien) of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I completed my MA. After passing the agrégation in Geography, I earned my PhD from the University of Grenoble Alpes. My dissertation received two national awards: the Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies and the Dissertation Award in Geography.
I am an Associate Member of St Peter’s College at Oxford University, a regular Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, an Early Career Representative at the Global Network on Financial Geography Committee, and a Research Associate at the Research Lab Géographie-cités (CNRS).
I occasionally write and talk about the geography of rugby.