We are delighted to announce that Professor Krzysztof Pelc is to join St Anne’s College in September 2023 as Professorial Fellow in International Relations. He will at the same time take up the Pearson Professorship of International Relations within the University.
Professor Pelc is currently the William Dawson Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. His research examines the international political economy. He is especially interested by how the design of rules can affect the odds of cooperation between states, and how some rules benefit some countries over others. This has led him to write about participation in international institutions, privacy and publicity, the effects of (il)legitimacy on political outcomes, optimal ambiguity, the impact of hard times on cooperation, precedent in public international law, whether workers can be compensated for losses from globalization, and the circumstances under which governments are allowed to break formal rules.
Professor Pelc received his PhD from Georgetown University, and spent his postdoc at Princeton’s Niehaus Center. He has been a visiting professor at NYU, the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies in New Delhi, and the University of Copenhagen. He was awarded the 2017 McGill’s Faculty of Arts Award for Distinction in Research.
His most recent book is “Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It”, with Oxford Press and Bloomsbury in which he argues that the true idols of market society are those who deny their self-interest, or appear to do so. He was also the winner of the Financial Times 2021 Essay Prize on the occasion of the Political Economy Club’s bicentenary.
On his appointment, Professor Pelc stated: “It is an immense privilege to be appointed to the Lester B. Pearson Chair at Oxford. We find ourselves at something of a turning point in international relations, when many of our old assumptions have been thrown into question. Pearson himself lived during similarly tumultuous times: he played an important part in the creation of the United Nations and NATO, and was later instrumental in resolving the Suez Crisis, an achievement that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope to use the Pearson chair to continue this intellectual legacy by investing in research that takes on real world problems using the tools of social science. I can’t think of a better place than Oxford, and its incomparable scholarly community, to take on this pressing set of questions.”
We look forward to welcoming Professor Pelc to Oxford and St Anne’s.