Biography
Professor Christopher Hill, FBA, M.A. DPhil (Oxon) joined the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) in October 2004 as the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations. He was previously the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations from 1991 to 2004 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He retired in September 2016 and since then has been Professor Emeritus of International Relations at POLIS. For the period 2017-2019 he has held the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Chair of International Relations at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, Bologna.
During his career he has also held visiting positions at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, the Department of Government at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, the European University Institute, Florence, the Università di Catania, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of California at San Diego, the Università di Siena and St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
Professor Hill has published widely in the areas of foreign policy analysis and general international relations, his most recent books being The Future of British Foreign Policy: Security and Diplomacy in a World after Brexit (2019), Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century (2016), The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies (Oxford University Press, 2013) and National and European Foreign Policies: Towards Europeanization (Edited with Reuben Wong, 2011).
Professor Hill was successively Vice-Chair and then Chair of the British International Studies Association between 1996-2000, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. He has been an elected Council Member at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and a member of many editorial advisory boards including those of the Journal of Common Market Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, International Affairs and Critique internationale. He was the Coordinator of FORNET, a foreign policy research network involving 25 European partners, under the auspices of the European Commission's Framework Programme V, and was Team Leader for the foreign policy section of EU-CONSENT, a similar network funded by Framework Programme VI. He led the Cambridge team in MERCURY, a Framework Programme VII research network on multilateralism.
Christopher Hill is an Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge where he served two terms as a Member of the Council. He also sat on the Council of the University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He was a member of the UK’s RAE2008 national panel for Politics and International Relations, and has served on a number of review panels for departments in other universities.
Research
Foreign Policy Analysis and the international politics of Europe (including both the EU’s external relations and the foreign policies of the Member States), as well as general International Relations, theories and practice. Hill continues to work on the relationship between social diversity and international relations, and is extending this into the international politics of migration. A further project is a comparison between British and French foreign policies since the end of the Cold War, provisionally entitled ‘Rivals in Decline’. The foreign policy dimension of Brexit has become a preoccupation.
Publications
- The Future of British Foreign Policy: Security and Diplomacy in a World after Brexit (Cambridge: Polity 2019)
- Edited (with Michael Smith), International Relations and the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2017).
- Europe’s Troublemakers: the Populist Challenge to Foreign Policy (with Rosa Balfour and nine other colleagues at the European Policy Centre, Brussels, 2016).
- Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
- (With Sarah Beadle), Britain's Greatest Assets: Soft Power and the UK's Roles in the World (London, British Academy, 2014).
- The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Edited (with Reuben Wong), National and European Foreign Policies: towards Europeanization (London: Routledge, 2011).
- The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (London: Palgrave, 2003).
- Edited (with Karen Smith), European Foreign Policy: Key Documents (London: Routledge, 2000).
- Translated and edited English version of Marching to Captivity: the War Diaries of a French Peasant 1939-1945 - Gustave Folcher (London: Brasseys, 1996). First published in French, as Les carnets de guerre de Gustave Folcher edited by Rémy Cazals, Maspero: Paris, 1981.
- Edited The Actors in Europe’s Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 1996); including as author ‘The United Kingdom: Sharpening Contradictions’ and (with William Wallace) ‘Introduction: Actors and Actions’.
- Edited (with Pamela Beshoff), Two Worlds of International Relations: Academics, Practitioners and the Trade in Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994); including as author ‘Academic International Relations: the Siren Song of Policy Relevance’, and (with Pamela Beshoff), ‘The Two Worlds: Natural Partnership or Necessary Distance?’
- Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: the British Experience October 1938 - June 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1991). Reissued in paperback, 2002.
Teaching and Supervisions
Christopher Hill lectures in the areas of Foreign Policy Analysis and the International Politics of Europe, with special reference to the EU and to the national foreign policies of Britain, France and Italy. He also lectures on themes of general international relations. From 2010-14 he ran and gave the lectures for the first undergraduate course ever to be taught at Cambridge on International Relations. He has regularly convened research methods seminars and for many years ran a foreign policy workshop for doctoral students. He has supervised over 40 successful doctoral theses, and still supervises research Masters students. Professor Hill no longer supervises PhD students.
