Dr Maria Grasso is a Lecturer in Politics and Quantitative Methods at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield.  Her main research interests are in political sociology, social change, political participation, and social movements.

She is the author of Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe (forthcoming with Routledge 2016) and Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Crisis (Ashgate 2015). She is Deputy Editor for Western Europe of Mobilization: An International Quarterly. Her work has been published in Electoral Studies, Work, Employment and Society, Comparative Sociology and other journals. She was a Research Fellow on the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualising Contestation (CCC) project’s UK team. She is a work-package Principal Investigator on two collaborative European Commission projects on social resilience in times of crisis (LIVEWHAT) and trans-national solidarity (TransSOL).