Timothy Power is DPIR’s Professor of Latin American Politics at St Antony’s College in a joint appointment with the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, of which he was head for a period, based at the Latin American Centre.
Hailing from just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the US academic’s most recent appointment was in 2021 when he became head of Oxford’s Social Sciences Division.
Having a fervent long-standing interest in Brazil – from its politics and history to its anthropology and culture - in 1990, he orchestrated the Brazilian Legislative Survey which he co-directs with Cesar Zucco Jr of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro.
Professor Power co-authored a book with Paul Chaisty and Nic Cheeseman based on their multi-year, ESRC-funded research project on "Coalitional Presidentialism in Africa, Latin America and Postcommunist Europe: Dynamics of Executive-Legislative Relations in New Democracies.
He was the Director of Graduate Studies in Politics in DPIR from 2012 to 2014 and has served as Treasurer of the Latin American Studies Association and as President of the Brazilian Studies Association.
In May 2020, he was jointly awarded the 2019 Robert Elgie best paper prize by the Presidential Politics Group of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR). His paper, with Paul Chaisty, ‘What Moves the Needle in Executive-Legislative Relations? Explaining Interbranch Oscillations in Legislative Authority’, explored changes in legislative authority between 1976 and 2014, across a range of democratic models.
He has now he has been in Oxford for almost 20 years, having spent some 13 years as an academic at universities in America’s south.
Professor Power lived in Puerto Rico at an early age with his family due to his father’s work, before they returned to the US in time for him to go to high school. As an undergraduate, he went to his local university to study politics.
A PhD in political science followed, culminating with a Fulbright scholarship at Notre Dame and another 18 months in Brazil, where he made a number of lifetime friendships and connections which have lasted a lifetime.
Seven years at Louisiana, were followed by six at Florida. Then, in 2005, he came to Oxford to the former Centre for Brazilian Studies (now the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies – where postgraduates can study a range of courses).Five years later, while undertaking a masters, he took advantage of an opportunity to attend a summer school in Brazil.
Professor Power is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Politics in Latin America and sits on the editorial boards of Comparative Political Studies, Political Behaviour, Latin American Politics and Society (USA), América Latina Hoy (Spain), Política y Gobierno (Mexico), and Dados (Brazil).