James Conran is a Departmental Lecturer in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.

His research and teaching interests are focused on comparative political economy and European politics, with a particular interest in the comparative study of social policy, redistribution, labour market regulation and collective bargaining. At the broadest normative and theoretical level, the question that animates these research interests is the complex relationship between capitalism and democracy in all their respective varieties. His current book manuscript examines the relationship between working time regulation and economic inequality (across both class and gender lines) in France, Germany and the United States. He has also published book chapters on historical institutionalism (with Kathleen Thelen) and comparative growth models (with Yeling Tan).

Prior to coming to Oxford, James was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oregon. He completed his PhD in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 after which he spent a year as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Government at Princeton. He also holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BA in History and Politics from University College, Dublin (UCD).

James is currently part of the teaching team for the MPP’s Politics of Policymaking module and looks forward to hearing from students with overlapping interests.