The Faculty of Law and the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM) at the Department for Politics and International Relations (DPIR) are seeking to appoint an Associate Professor of Law, Politics and Computational Social Science.  This a joint appointment with Nuffield College and successful candidate will be a member of DPIR and the Faculty of Law and a Non-Tutorial Fellow at Nuffield College.

 

The successful candidate will be expected to conduct internationally excellent research at the intersection of questions of law, politics and computational social science methods. They will also teach and supervise at the graduate level; contribute to admissions, examining, and assessment; and contribute fully to academic administration in Law, DPIR and the College. The postholder will be based in CASSM at DPIR and is expected to devote 50% of their departmental duties within each department. There will also be duties associated with the College.  The position is open to candidates with a research profile in fields such as computational social science, law, politics, social data science or related areas. Candidates need not have legal training but must be capable of engaging with and contributing to legal research.

 

The successful candidate will be expected to conduct innovative research that combines strength in advanced computational social science methods with important data driven insights for questions of law and politics. We particularly welcome applications from candidates with methodological skills in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, GenAI & prompt engineering, or agent-based modelling.  We also strongly encourage applications from women and/or candidates from a BME background as they are currently under-represented in academic posts.

 

This post is available from 1 January 2027, or as soon as possible thereafter. This is a permanent appointment (subject to successful review during the initial period of office).

 

If you would like to discuss this post and find out more about joining the academic community at Oxford, please contact Professor Rebecca Williams (rebecca.williams@law.ox.ac.uk) or Professor Ben Ansell, the Director of CASSM (ben.ansell@politics.ox.ac.uk).  All enquiries will be treated in strict confidence and will not form part of the selection decision.

 

Applications for this vacancy are to be made online. You will be required to upload a CV and a cover letter, and a separate research statement and teaching statement as part of your application.   
Further information on the application process can be found here: How to apply | Oxford University

 

Circumstances such as caring responsibilities, ill health or disability may result in the quantity of a candidate's outputs being less than might otherwise be expected, therefore when considering candidate's research and publication record, career breaks will be taken into consideration.

 

Only applications received before 12:00 midday (UK time) on Tuesday 15 September 2026 can be considered. Please quote reference 187655 in all correspondence.