Professor Paul Irwin Crookes

I have been based at Oxford since October 2011 and teach on China's foreign policy and international relations in the Contemporary China Studies Programme of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). Prior to this, I was a lecturer at the University of Manchester, where I taught on the international relations of East Asia and the politics of the European Union. I have MPhil and PhD degrees from the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and hold a BSc(Economics) from the LSE. My research examines UK-China economic relations after Brexit and the politics of EU-China relations. I am a Fellow of Kellogg College.

I am also the current Associate Head (Education) of the Social Sciences Division, providing strategic leadership for educational provision in Social Sciences at Oxford.

In the academic discipline of international relations, I adopt an analytically eclectic theoretical position in the tradition of accepting that no one paradigm is likely to have all the answers to complex interactions within today’s international system.

I embarked on my academic career after working for 20 years in the international IT industry, which took me on work assignments beyond the UK to the United States, continental Europe, India and China. During this time I provided consulting services to many different kinds of organisations, including high-tech start-ups, multinational corporations, EU institutions, and national government agencies. I had a particularly enjoyable time on one assignment living and working in Beijing, leading an international team of computer software designers working on risk analysis projects for the underwriting insurance market, where I specialised in defining intellectual property protection strategies for a successful Sino-British commercial partnership.