The Department of Politics and International Studies is delighted to announce that Dr Glen Rangwala has been awarded the 2026 Aaron Rapport Teaching Prize.
This annual accolade, determined entirely by student nominations, recognises outstanding dedication and excellence in teaching within the Department. Each year, POLIS invites students to nominate the lecturer, supervisor, or seminar leader who has most profoundly influenced their academic development. Rather than relying solely on the volume of nominations, the selection committee closely considers the detailed feedback provided by students, ensuring the prize reflects genuine impact across our diverse fields of study.
This year, the Prize has been awarded to Dr Glen Rangwala, who lectures on the Politics of the Middle East, and whose courses every year are rated by students as among the best they have taken. Dr Rangwala’s commitment to fostering an engaging and supportive learning environment was highly praised by students across the Department. Respondents highlighted his ability to bring complex academic themes to life and his meticulous attention to individual student progress.
A selection of comments from this year's student feedback underscores his impact:
"Glen Rangwala his supervisions and his lectures have been brilliant. His enthusiasm for his subjects has definitely made the paper more exciting."
"Glen is great - the supervisions were very useful and his essay feedback was detailed and really well explained."
Glen responded to winning the Prize by recalling the person after whom the prize was named:
“Working alongside Aaron Rapport was always quite exhilarating. He had a habit of finding unexpected ways of engaging with a topic – it compelled you to re-think something that you thought you knew about, and made you realise there are never any final words when it comes to key questions in politics and international relations. It couldn’t be more fitting that the prize is named in honour of him.
My lectures don’t hit the high standards Aaron achieved: the ideas I put to the students in the lectures must often seem a bit underdeveloped; the accounts I provide are sometimes rather garbled. I want to thank recent students for turning out lecture and lecture as I try to develop some themes with them over the course of the year.
The topics I teach in contemporary Middle Eastern politics though often feel like they work best in the small group supervisions we have, alongside the lectures. It’s in those sustained discussions that students are best able to work through their own thinking on matters of heightened controversy and appreciate different perspectives. The students are all fantastically clever – all I’m doing often is giving them the space to think through the issues for themselves.”
Established to celebrate exceptional teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, the Department’s teaching prize was renamed in 2020 to honour the memory of Dr Aaron Rapport. Dr Rapport was an exceptionally popular and vibrant member of the POLIS community, renowned for the humour, originality, and intellectual energy he brought to his lectures on international relations and US foreign policy.
The Department extends its warmest congratulations to Dr Glen Rangwala for this well-deserved recognition of his exceptional contribution to the POLIS learning community.