A University of Montana political science professor will spend the academic year sharing his expertise and research at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.
Dr. Robert Saldin, a political scientist and co-director of UM’s Democracy Studies Program, has been awarded the Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The visiting professorship is a highly-competitive international research honor and will allow Saldin to pursue his studies at Oxford while collaborating with scholars based there.
Saldin, an expert on U.S. politics, will research the role of the Clinton administration and a broader network of U.S. political actors during the Northern Ireland peace process in the late 1990s.
“It’s an honor to have been chosen to serve as the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford,” Saldin said. “I’m joining the Rothermere American Institute to study, from a comparative perspective, the United States and its place in the world during this period of change and upheaval.”
Saldin’s appointment began in mid-August and will run through July 2027.
He and other scholars will collect British, Irish and American materials on the making of the Good Friday Agreement for a single, accessible digital archive. The result will be a comprehensive historical record of the historic 1998 peace accord that largely ended the violent conflict in Northern Ireland.
Saldin will then deliver a series of Leverhulme Lectures on his findings at Oxford and other universities around the U.K, including in Belfast.
Kyle Volk, a UM history professor and co-director of the Democracy Studies Program, said it is a huge accomplishment for Saldin to be in Oxford expanding his research and scholarship. At the end of the visiting professorship, Saldin will contribute what he learned to UM’s research community, Volk said.
“For UM, it is a major point of pride that one of our faculty members has been selected for an internationally competitive professorship of this kind,” Volk said. “It is a testament to Rob’s scholarship as well as the quality of research being produced at UM by faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences – and particularly, those faculty contributing to the new Democracy Studies Program.”
The Democracy Studies Program began in 2024 and is Montana’s only stand-alone academic unit dedicated to undergraduate civic education and the study of democracy in the U.S. and across the globe.
The goal of the interdisciplinary program is to strengthen civic education by offering courses, degree paths, and programming that enhance civic education at UM. Democracy Studies is offered as a minor and the program is in the process of launching a Certificate in Civic Knowledge and Practice. A major in Democracy Studies is in the planning stages.
By Kyle Spurr, UM News Service