About us

The Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London was founded in August 2004, following strategic investment by the College. It quickly expanded and is now an established centre of teaching and research excellence in the UK. We are a vibrant department with a diverse and very active student body, and are located in Royal Holloway's prestigious Founder's Building. We warmly invite you to join us.

We offer a range of undergraduate degrees, including Joint Honours programmes with Economics, Geography, History, and Philosophy, and now also offer a Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree.  At Masters level we offer a range of stream programmes in politics and international relations, including specialist programmes in Contemporary Political Theory, Global Politics, International Relations Theory, New Political Communication, and Transnational Security Studies. The Department has a strong and growing MPhil/PhD programme, and our recent research students have gone on to exciting and successful careers, including research and lecturing positions at Sussex, Edinburgh, Sydney (Australia), and the London School of Economics. The Department has ESRC recognition through its participation in the Southeast Doctoral Training Centre, and offers ESRC and other scholarships to highly qualified research students.

Our research explores cutting-edge areas of the discipline, and is supported through four active research units: the Centre for European Politics, the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics, the New Political Communication Unit and the Contemporary Political Theory Research Group. In addition, the Department now hosts Royal Holloway's Centre for Social Sciences, which was established in 2012.

In both our teaching and research, the Department focuses on political life at the global, the national and the local levels, and the way these interact to shape society, culture and economics. Our different approaches complement and enrich one another, and this is reflected in the way in which our degree programmes are designed and taught. The research and teaching offered is of the highest quality.