About
Tim Dunne is Interim President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey, where he also holds the substantive role of Provost and Senior Vice-President. He leads the academic mission of the university, chairs key governance bodies including Senate and the University Promotions Committee, and serves on the Executive Board and Council. He is the University lead on Free Speech and Academic Freedom.
Tim Dunne’s academic career spans over three decades, with prior leadership roles at The University of Queensland (UQ), where he was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. He also held leadership positions at the University of Exeter and Aberystwyth University. His PhD was completed at the University of Oxford, where he won a national prize.
His research focuses on international relations theory, foreign policy, human rights, and the evolution of global order. He has made significant contributions to normative international theory, particularly through works on the Responsibility to Protect, intervention ethics, and the historiography of international thought. His interdisciplinary approach bridges political science and history, emphasizing pluralistic and historicizing methods in understanding global affairs.
Tim Dunne has authored or co-edited seventeen books, including Human Rights in Global Politics, Worlds in Collision, Terror in Our Time, The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect, The Globalization of International Society (prize-winning), and The Rise of the International (2024). He has co-edited the Review of International Studies and the European Journal of International Relations, and co-edited two major OUP textbooks: Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases and International Relations Theories.
His scientific recognitions include:
- Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia
- Prize for PhD at University of Oxford
- Prize for The Globalization of International Society (2017)
Tim Dunne occasionally teaches graduate classes on intervention and international relations theory. He is actively engaged in public scholarship, publishing commentaries in the Times Higher Education and sharing insights on his LinkedIn blog. He also contributes to higher education governance as a Governor of Farnborough College of Technology (Chair of Risk and Audit Committee) and as a Board member of the National Physical Laboratory.
