Prior to taking up the full-time post of Director of the RAI in September 2011, Nigel Bowles was for more than twenty years Tutorial Fellow in Politics at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He was previously a staff member in the House of Commons before being appointed a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. His intellectual interests lie in American political history and, in particular, in the history of the US Presidency.

Having taught at the Universities of Sussex, 1973-4, and London (Imperial College), 1974-9, I returned in 1979 to Oxford, where I had been an undergraduate at Corpus, 1966-9, graduate at Nuffield, 1969-72, and junior research fellow at Jesus, 1972-3, this time as politics tutor at New College, working alongside first Alan Ryan and then Elizabeth Frazer. I was Oxford's co-ordinator for politics and international studies in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise, and acted as head of the Department of Politics and International Relations in its "shadow" phase, 1999-2000.

I am Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Fellow in Politics at Corpus Christi College.

For the academic year 2024-2025, I am Visiting Professor at Science Po Paris, Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée.

Research

Political Theory; Groups, Identities and Social Movements; Political thought and ideologies; Norms, legitimacy and justification; Democratic theory; Feminism, Gender, Identity.

Research

International Relations Theory; International Intellectual History; Historical IR

Teaching

I teach the core Undergraduate International Relations paper (214) and the two historical IR undergraduate papers (212 and 213). I am the course provider for International Relations in an Era of Two World Wars (212)

MPhil option: The Making of Modern International Society

Research summary

Much of my research concerns equality and agency. In that vein a part of my work involves exploring and defending a form of egalitarianism which judges all inequalities in some respect unfair unless they are appropriately related to the choices persons make. Some of this has consisted in reflecting on the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold persons responsible for their choices; more specifically, asking when the responsible choices persons make justify their being worse off than others.

Research

Political Theory, Law and International law, Norms, legitimacy and justification, Rights, Justice, and Equality, Ideology, Methods

In September 2016, I retired from my post as Associate Professor in DPIR and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford where I had been since 1975, when I took up the position of the first Fellow and Tutor in Politics there. My primary interests are in empirical politics and I have published in the fields of British, American and comparative politics. In addition to my more specialist research interests, I have enjoyed writing and editing books which make political developments available to a broader audience.