Academic Board

Anoush Ehteshami is Professor of International Relations in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. He is the Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah Chair in International Relations and Director of the HH Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah Programme in International Relations, Regional Politics and Security. He is, further, Director of the Institute for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies (IMEIS) at Durham, one of the oldest and noted centres of excellence in Middle Eastern studies in Europe. He acts as Co-director (2016-2021) of the £3.9 million AHRC-funded Open Worlds Initiative entitled Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community. Previously (2006-2016), he acted as Joint Director of the nationally (RCUK)-funded Durham-Edinburgh-Manchester Universities’ research and training Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). He was Durham University’s first Dean of Internationalization, 2009-2011, and was the founding Head of the School of Government and International Affairs (2004-9).
a.ehteshami@durham.ac.uk

Mishana Hosseinioun is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics and a Lecturer in International Relations at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. She is an Academic Affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a member of St Antony’s College at Oxford. She received her BA (Hons) in Rhetoric and Near Eastern Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MPhil (Clarendon Scholar) and DPhil in International Relations from University College at Oxford University. Her research interests span from contentious politics to political psychology. Building upon her monograph, The Human Rights Turn and the Paradox of Progress in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and other publications, her current research projects include: The application of social contract theory in the Middle Eastern context; Diagnosing state psychopathy, split-brain politics, and other ‘disorders’ in international relations. Dr Hosseinioun’s research and teaching benefit from her work in the field as a practitioner through intimate involvement via her international justice consultancy MH Group in live political cases from Libya to South Korea and Palestine and close dealings with international bodies like the United Nations Human Rights Council, the African Commission and Court on Human Rights, and the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

mishana.hosseinioun@ccc.ox.ac.uk

Vahid Nick Pay is a lecturer in International Politics at the Diplomatic Studies Programme. He is Chair of the Exam Board and a member of the Management Board at the Oxford University's Diplomatic Studies Programme, Chair of the Exam Board for Global Health Diplomacy course, member of the management committee at the Centre for International Studies (CIS - University of Oxford), Fellow of Kellogg College University of Oxford and a Fellow of Higher Education Academy.
Dr Nick Pay is a multidisciplinary academic with expertise and interests in several fields of Social Sciences such as Discourse Analysis, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Security Studies and Political Theology. He also has extensive experience in other professional domains such as Journalism, IT and Healthcare Policy. Vahid's initial higher education was in the field of Linguistics where he also taught courses in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. After some years of professional engagement with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), he switched fields to Political Science, studying first at the University of London (Master of Science in Political Theory, Birkbeck) and then the University of Durham (PhD in Political Science), where he examined Republican political philosophy, particularly in relation to other sources of sovereignty and legitimacy, notably religion. He held teaching and research positions in Italy, Iraq, Iran, France and the UK, and has also extensively published and disseminated research results in prominent peer-reviewed journals and public media around the world.
vahid.nickpay@conted.ox.ac.uk

Joseph S. Nye Jr. University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University,won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. His most recent books include The Power to Lead; The Future of Power; Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era; and Is the American Century Over. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers.
Joseph_Nye@hks.harvard.edu

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002, and for a period that began in 2012-13 holds a joint position as Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017. Born and raised in Ireland, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; there he held a professorial position jointly in Social and Political Theory and Philosophy until 2002. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010 and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2013; he has long been a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen's University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Universite de Montreal, Queen's University, Belfast and the University of Athens. Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.
ppettit@princeton.edu

Paul Sharp is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He has published extensively on aspects of diplomacy and international theory, including Diplomatic Theory of International Relations, Cambridge 2009 and Diplomacy in the 21st Century: A Brief Introduction, Abingdon, 2019. He was founding chair of the Diplomatic Studies Section of the International Studies Association and founding co-editor of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. He is currently working on a project on Chinese thought and Chinese diplomacy
psharp@d.umn.edu

Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of many other national academies. His scholarship is available in more than two dozen languages, and has won him many awards, including the Isaiah Berlin Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, the Bielefeld Wissenschaftspreis, a Balzan Prize and two awards from the American Political Science Association. Skinner has been the recipient of honorary degrees from more than a dozen leading universities, including Athens, Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), was listed by the Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since World War II.
q.skinner@qmul.ac.uk

Nikolaos Theodorakis is a Lecturer at the Oxford University Diplomatic Studies Programme, Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Kellogg College. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge where he focused on issues of Corporate Compliance, Liability and Regulation. He holds degrees from the University of Athens (LL.B.), University of Cambridge (M.Phil.) and University College London (LL.M.). His research agenda currently spans across three pillars: different forms of Financial Crime and how they intertwine with International Development; effective regulatory regimes for banking institutions and corporations; and relevant compliance strategies pertaining to International Trade and Competition Law.
nikolaos.theodorakis@conted.ox.ac.uk