Rate My Professor Carmen Pavel

Dr. Carmen Pavel holds the position of Reader in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics within the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in Political Theory from Brown University in 2007. Her academic career includes serving as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law at the University of Virginia, followed by roles as Associate Professor and Associate Director at the Centre for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, where she also held a courtesy appointment in the Department of Philosophy. Since joining King’s College London in 2015, she has been instrumental in shaping the institution’s PPE programme, acting as its inaugural director from 2015 to 2018 and contributing to its redesign.

Pavel’s research focuses on political philosophy, the history of political thought, the philosophy of international law, liberal theory and its modern challenges, as well as ethics and public policy. She is the author of Divided Sovereignty: International Institutions and the Limits of State Authority (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Law Beyond the State: Dynamic Coordination, State Consent, and Binding International Law (Oxford University Press, 2021), the latter earning the Best Book Award from the International Studies Association’s International Law section. Pavel co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Freedom with David Schmidtz (Oxford University Press, 2018) and served as guest editor for the special issue “The Institutions of International Justice” in Social Philosophy and Policy (32:1, 2015). Her peer-reviewed articles include “Global and National Constitutionalism” in The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (2025), “The International Rule of Law” in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2020), “Coercion and Justification: A Global Public Reason Perspective on Security Council Reform” in Journal of Law and Society (2023), and “A Legal Conventionalist Approach to Pollution” in Law and Philosophy (2016). Pavel welcomes PhD supervision in areas such as philosophy of international law, constitutionalism, and contemporary liberalism. She has held visiting positions at Tulane University and the University of Oslo.