2027 Academic Fellow, January – December
Michael Kenny is Professor of Public Policy and the inaugural Head of the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge where he leads its “Place and Public Policy” research programme. Respected as a thought-leader on questions of evidence and expertise in government decision making, civil service capabilities and governance reform, Professor Kenny combines contributing in these areas with his ongoing research interests in governance, the constitution, nationalism and regional inequality. Professor Kenny has extensive experience of delivering advice and training to first ministers, ministers, public servants and others working in government from across the world, including the UK, Australia, Ireland, Singapore and Spain. He is a contributor to public debate via media engagement, is regularly invited to present to senior audiences and is a senior academic leader who has secured important philanthropic support in pursuit of the Bennett School’s mission of ‘The right kind of growth fairly shared’. In 2021, Professor Kenny was made a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of the Social Sciences in recognition of the international standing of his expertise and his ongoing contributions to research mobilisation, knowledge exchange and impact.
Professor Kenny has extensive experience in advising government. In the UK, he has delivered private briefings to senior ministers and politicians from different political parties on multiple different occasions. He has also delivered presentations to senior public servants in UK government, including private seminars with several UK Permanent Secretaries and Directors General as well as a private meeting of all Permanent Secretaries on the future of the UK Union. He has delivered seminars by invitation to government agencies ranging from the Foreign Office and the Department of Communities and Local Government to the Department for Culture Media and Sport. In 2025, he gave private briefings on research conducted on the UK’s new Council of Nations and Regions to officials from the Cabinet Office, UK, and the Scottish and Welsh governments.
In addition to providing advice to government, Professor Kenny is regularly called upon to provide expert evidence before parliamentary committees at Westminster (including the Constitution Committee and PACAC) as well as the Welsh Senedd. He has been a member of independent commissions, most recently the “Levelling Up” commission established by the UK’s Local Government Association, and has been a member of external advisory panels, including a recent panel advising the Scottish Parliament on the Constitutional Implications of Brexit. Professor Kenny has combined these roles with a public presence delivering multiple talks to public audiences at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, the Hay Literary Festival, and fringe events at the Labour and Conservative Party annual conferences. He has delivered numerous plenary and keynote lectures at locations such as the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the Constitution Unit at UCL, the University of Nanjing in China, the University of Melbourne in Australia and London School of Economics.
An internationally recognised expert in place-based governance and policymaking, Professor Kenny has also been actively engaged as a trusted policy adviser on the future training needs of the public sector. In his role as Director of one of the world’s leading professional development programmes in public policy (the Cambridge MPhil in Public Policy), Professor Kenny has been involved in redesigning its curriculum in response to the immense challenges affecting democratic governance. More recently, he has also been providing advice to civil servants developing the UK’s School of Government and, earlier this year, he was one of six Policy School Directors to be invited to a two-day symposium with Ministers from the Spanish Government including private audiences with the Spanish Prime Minister and King Felipe VI. He has been invited on two occasions to deliver sessions on the UK-wide Civil Service training programme on Devolution and has advised on “social infrastructure” to officials in the UK Civil Service and the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation.
Before arriving at Cambridge in 2017, Professor Kenny held positions at Queen’s University, Belfast, the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary University (QMU) of London. At QMU, Professor Kenny was the inaugural Director of the Mile End Institute – an initiative that brought together politicians, policymakers, academics and the public to debate the major challenges facing the UK. In addition to these appointments, Professor Kenny has held roles as co-Chair of the British Academy’s ‘Governing England’ programme, the Leverhulme Trust’s Advisory Committee and was co-director of the British Academy’s “Governing England” programme. He holds an appointment as a Professorial Fellow at Fitzwilliam College and sits on the Management Boards of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, the Battcock Institute and the Centre for Science and Policy. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, the Institute for Policy Research at Bath University, the Constitution Unit at UCL and the Centre for Research into the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), at the University of Cambridge. He has also been a Research Fellow at the ESRC-funded Centre on Constitutional Change, University of Edinburgh and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research one of the UK’s leading think tanks.
Fellowship focus
Rethinking systems-level leadership, public service capability and the political-administrative interface in an era of political turbulence.
Publications & Awards
Awards / Recognition
2021 | Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK).
2021 | Joint winner of the Crick Prize for Best Article in Political Quarterly.
2015 | Winner of the Mackenzie Prize for the Best Book in Politics awarded by the Political Studies Association (UK).
Selected publications – peer reviewed journal articles
Coyle, D. and Kenny, M. (2025) ‘How to get science back into policymaking’, Nature, 648, pp. 275–277. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03978-6
Kenny, M. and Luca, D. (2024) ‘Drifting further apart? Europe’s trends of urban-rural political polarisation should not be overstated’, Political Geography, 114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103181
Kenny, M. (2021) ‘Governance, politics and political economy – England’s questions after Brexit’, Territory, Politics, Governance. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2021.1962732
Kenny, M. and Luca, D. (2021) ‘The urban-rural polarisation of political disenchantment: an investigation of social and political attitudes in 30 European countries’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 14(3), pp. 565–582. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsab012
Kenny, M. and Sheldon, J. (2021) ‘“A place apart”, or integral to “our precious Union”? Understanding the nature and implications of Conservative Party thinking about Northern Ireland, 2010–19’, Irish Political Studies, 36(2), pp. 291–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2020.1847418
Selected publications – books
Kenny, M. and Pearce, N. (2027). The World Island: the maritime idea in British politics (Polity Press).
Kenny, M. (2024). Fractured Union; Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK (Hurst).
Connect
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