Studying at Nuffield College - Politics and International Relations

Politics at Nuffield spans the field of political science, in its broadest sense. Fellows and students work on topics in government and public administration, comparative politics, electoral politics and political sociology, political history, foreign policy and international relations. The College is particularly well represented in the politics of Britain, the United States, Latin America and Europe (including the EU), but students in the Politics Group are engaged in research on many other areas, including India, South-East Asia, and Africa. There is also a strong political theory group, whose members work on a range of historical, contemporary and international questions. Students are encouraged to develop methodological skills appropriate to their chosen research topic: the College has a particular strength in the statistical analysis of social science data sets, where students in Politics often collaborate with fellows in neighbouring disciplines.

The permanent fellows in the Politics Group can provide advice and supervisory help on most specialised topics and sub-fields within political science. In addition, the Group runs an active academic visitors' programme, which brings senior figures in the discipline to Nuffield for periods ranging from a few weeks to a year, and these visiting scholars are encouraged to make themselves available to students for consultation. Students also have access to politicians, civil servants and political researchers who are attached to the College through our visiting fellowship programme.

Most Politics/IR students who come to Nuffield do so with a DPhil as their final goal. Some take master's degrees, for example - the one-year MSc in Politics Research, or the two-year MPhil in International Relations - as a first step, though students who already have adequate research training in politics may be admitted by the University to Probationer Research Student status, which leads directly to the DPhil without further coursework. Some students who have completed an MSc or an MPhil elsewhere in Oxford choose on academic grounds to move to Nuffield to complete a DPhil - for instance if their supervisor is located here. One or two visiting students, working for PhDs in other universities, are also admitted for a maximum of one year.

The particular research topics chosen by Politics students at Nuffield vary widely from one cohort to the next. See the list of recent DPhil titles which underlines the diversity of the research carried out in the College:

'Rhodesian UDI and the Search for a Settlement 1964-68: Failure of Decolonisation.'

'Assistance with Strings Attached: Good Governance Conditionality in International Society.'

'Conflict in EU Budgetary Politics: An Institutionalist Analysis.'

'Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Party Competition in India.'

'The European Court of Justice and the Limits of Supranational Autonomy.'

'Franklin D Roosevelt and the Last Great Cause: US Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.'

The research interests in politics of permanent Fellows of the College include: