Rate My Professor Michael Kenny

Professor Michael Kenny is Head of Department at the Bennett School of Public Policy and a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he also serves as a Professorial Fellow at Fitzwilliam College. He was previously the Inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University. Prior to Cambridge, Kenny held positions at Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Sheffield—where he was appointed Head of the Department of Politics—and Queen Mary University of London, serving as the inaugural Director of the Mile End Institute. He has undertaken prominent roles such as serving on the Leverhulme Trust’s Advisory Committee (2010-2018), co-directing the British Academy’s ‘Governing England’ programme (2015-2018), acting as a visiting Fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit, and being a member of the advisory board of the Constitution Society. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of the Social Sciences.

Kenny’s academic interests focus on public policy, governance and devolution, territorial politics, British politics and political ideas, the politics of place, and English governance. He leads research on infrastructure policy and, as part of The Productivity Institute, examines institutional and governance questions related to UK productivity. Currently, he is co-authoring ‘The World Island’ with Nick Pearce, exploring policy and ideological implications of the UK as a maritime state. Kenny teaches on the MPhil in Public Policy. His key publications include Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK (Hurst Publishers, 2024), Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (with Nick Pearce, Polity, 2018), The Politics of English Nationhood (Oxford University Press, 2014)—winner of the UK Political Studies Association’s ‘Mackenzie’ prize—and Governing England (editor, Proceedings of the British Academy, 2018). He has delivered public lectures, including his inaugural lecture for the Department of Politics and International Studies, and contributed to policy discussions on UK constitutional matters.