After reading Modern Languages at Keble College Oxford, I joined the British Diplomatic Service. In the course of the next 38 years, I was posted to Lebanon to study Arabic and then to Paris as a Third Secretary. I was subsequently posted to Canberra where, after working as a First Secretary in the political section, I was transferred to the newly independent Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) as Political Advisor during a civil war. I returned to Canberra to become Head of the Economic and Commercial Section and Agricultural Advisor.
I am an interdisciplinary scholar in my field of research, using methodologies as diverse as those of political science, legal analysis, international relations, and sociology to research and write on a range of topics, especially at the boundary of politics and law and of politics and ecology. I specialise in transnational public policy makers and their interactions with domestic institutions (viz., courts and parliaments) and supranational regimes, especially the Council of Europe and the EU.
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet and Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College. She is a political scientist specialising in the relationship between digital technology and government, politics and public policy. She is an advocate for the potential of multi-disciplinarity and computational social science for our understanding of political behaviour and development of public policy in a digital world.
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.
My research focuses on the role of international law and institutions in promoting international cooperation. I work on issues relating to multilateralism, treaty making, global constitutionalization and preferential trade.
I give tutorials in International Relations to Univ undergraduates, and I teach International Political Economy and Research Design & Methods courses to graduate students at the Department of Politics and International Relations.