Professor Krzysztof Pelc to join DPIR

The Department is delighted to announce that Professor Krzysztof Pelc will join the team in September 2023 as the Pearson Professor of International Relations.

Professor Pelc is currently William Dawson Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University.

His research examines the international political economy, with a particular focus on how the design of rules can affect the odds of cooperation between states, and how some rules benefit some countries over others.

He received his PhD from Georgetown University, and spent his postdoc at Princeton' 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.

In his most recent book–Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It–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 for his essay on conspicuous consumption.

Professor Pelc also occasionally writes fiction, and was the 2019 winner of Canada's CBC Short Story Prize.

He said: “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.”