Janina Dill, Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government, has won a Social Sciences Division Teaching Excellence Award, which recognises the outstanding contribution to teaching and learning and the academic development of students shown by colleagues across the division.

Janina teaches the core compulsory course on the Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree called "The Politics of Policymaking", which she co-convenes. This course is designed to prepare students to navigate diverse institutional contexts by learning how to "think politically", navigating evolving dynamics for the successful implementation of policies. 

Alongside these roles, Janina has also taught a newly-designed option module, "War and Global Security", which seeks to help students to understand patterns, choices, and cases of military force used across international borders. She also convenes the Global Security Cluster, a space for deepening engagement with specialist issues in ways that complement the course, from speaker events to field trips. Her recent interactive lectures for the whole MPP cohort on “Politics Among States: How to keep states secure under anarchy?” and “Foreign Policy Analysis: Predicting choice in crisis – when do U.S. Presidents go to war?” brought to bear complex international relations theories on current contexts of warfare.

Professor Ngaire Woods, founding Dean of the Blavatnik School, said:

Janina Dill is an outstanding teacher. She sets the highest standards not just of intellectual ambition and precision, but of inspiration and creativity. 

She does not shy away from difficult and complex topics, but rather in the same spirit in which she regularly contributes her expertise to the BBC, to other international media outlets, and to Parliamentary Committees in several countries, she approaches sensitive topics patiently, respectfully and open-mindedly for 141 MPP students from more than 60 countries whom she teaches.

One MPP student said: 

Janina Dill stands out as an exceptional educator. Her sessions had an intellectual energy that was distinctive and consistent across all three weeks she led […] Many instructors treat seminar discussion as a vehicle for delivering prepared points; Dill treated it as a genuine inquiry where student contributions shaped where the analysis went. 

The result was sessions that felt intellectually alive rather than choreographed. Her week on foreign policy analysis in particular brought together rational choice, prospect theory, and affective politics in a way that was unusually integrated and immediately applicable to real-world cases.

Janina is also a Fellow at Trinity College and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict.