Paul Ashwin - Biography#

Professor Paul Ashwin is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. He has been a member of the Department since 2004, and has served as Head of Department for three terms of office. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

He gained his PhD at University College London (UCL) in 2000 after an MSc (Econ) in the philosophy of the social sciences at the London School of Economics in 1994 (which was funded by a scholarship from the British Academy).

He has been an active member of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), an international research centre funded by the Economic and Social Research Centre at UCL and the University of Oxford since its establishment in 2015, acting as Principal Investigator of two of its key projects. Between 2020 and 2023 he was Deputy Director of CGHE. The Centre’s mission has been to research the inequalities within, and consequences of, the globalisation of higher education, and brings together researchers in Africa and Asia as well as Europe.

Professor Ashwin’s major work has been in the area of knowledge, curriculum and student agency. He is the sole author, or joint author, of 31 articles in highly cited journals; 8 books (with another one in an advanced stage of development); and 25 books chapters. He has given a wide range of keynote and plenary speeches at a range of conferences (including the Central European University in Vienna, the University of Hong Kong, Aarhus University, the National University of Ireland in Galway and the University of Trieste in addition to UK universities). He is a member of the editorial boards of two highly cited journals, Higher Education and Policy Studies in Higher Education. He has acted as an external consultant for a number of institutions, including the University of Sussex in the UK, Tampere University in Finland, the University of Cyprus, the University of Hong Kong and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

He has successfully supervised 33 PhD students, and is currently supervising a further 23 PhD candidates. He has also been actively involved in examining PhD students, both as an internal and external examiner (66 in total).