Staff profile
Professor Karen Lai
Professor
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Professor in the Department of Geography | +44 (0) 191 33 41865 |
Biography
Dr Karen Lai is Professor of Economic Geography at Durham University (UK). Her research expertise includes geographies of money and finance, FinTech, financial infrastructure and digital economies, focusing particularly on issues of financialisation, knowledge networks, and financial centre development. Karen received her Bachelor and Master degrees in Geography from the National University of Singapore, and PhD in Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham (UK). She was previously based at the National University of Singapore and University of British Columbia (Canada).
As the Internationalisation Lead for the Department of Geography at Durham University, Karen is responsible for internationalisation engagements and strategic planning. She is a founding member and served in executive committee roles on the Global Network on Financial Geography (FinGeo) for almost a decade. She is co-founder and Deputy Editor in Chief of Finance and Space journal, Editor of Economic Geography, and former Associate Editor for Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She also serves on the journal editorial boards/international advisory boards of Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Geoforum, Geography Compass (Economic section), Progress in Economic Geography, and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.
She is working on two current strands of research: 1) how FinTech is shaping consumer practices and competitive relationships between financial institutions and technology companies; 2) the growth of data centres in Southeast Asia to analyse the differentiated roles of data services in financial centres, the environmental impacts of data centre growth and associated roles of green finance in this sector.
A previous project examines the business organisation and networks of investment banks and law firms in Asia and their implications for financial centre development and global/regional financial networks. Karen has also written on financial subject formation and the financialisation of everyday life, using empirical findings from Asia to build theoretical arguments on financial ecologies and state-led financialisation.
Research Groups
Research interests
- Geographies of money and finance
- International financial centres
- Fintech and digital economies
- Data centres and financial infrastructure
- Political economy and development in Asia
Esteem Indicators
- 2024 - 2025: Visiting Scholar, National Foreign Experts Programme, Beijing Normal University:
- 2022 - 2025: Visiting Faculty, Singapore Management University: