Bio:
José Tapia is a professor of politics with a background in health sciences and economics. He worked in Spain as a primary care doctor, and in the publishing industry. In 1989 he moved to the US to work for WHO. After teaching eleven years at the University of Michigan, he joined Drexel in 2014. His early research focused on the effects of economic changes on mortality. More recently his interests have moved toward climate change, environmental issues, and the world economy. His most recent books are Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe and the USSR (De Gruyter, 2022), and Six Crises of the World Economy: Globalization and Economic Turbulence since the 1960s to the COVID-19 Pandemic (Palgrave-Macmillan, in press). He teaches courses on international political economy, political economy of climate change, social development, and political parties. He plays chess, and is passionate about movies (for instance by Kurosawa, Truffaut, or Kubrick), music (for example by Johann Sebastian Bach, Mahler, Shostakovich, Joan Baez, The Beatles, or Atahualpa Yupanqui) and literature (by Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Lu Xun, George Orwell, Roberto Bolaño, Primo Levi, Federico García Lorca, Constantine Cavafy, Ondra Lysohorsky, and many other authors). He will retire soon.