John Ravenhill is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo. He is the former Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a position he occupied from 2013-2019. From 2019 to 2023, he was Chair of the Political Science Department at UW. Previously, Dr. Ravenhill was the Head of the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, where he also co-directed the ANU’s MacArthur Foundation Asia Security Initiative project.
After obtaining his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Sydney before joining ANU in 1990. In 2000, he took up the Chair of Politics at the University of Edinburgh for four years. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva, the International University of Japan, the University of California, Berkeley, and was the NTUC Professor of International Economic Relations at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Ravenhill’s “Covid project” was to study for an LLB through the UK’s Open University: he graduated with First Class Honours in April 2024.
His work has appeared in most of the leading journals of international relations including International Organization, World Politics, Review of International Political Economy and Review of International Studies. For two decades, he co-edited (with James Cotton) the flagship book series of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Australia in World Affairs. He was an editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and was the founding editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Cambridge Asia-Pacific Studies. He is also on the Editorial Boards of Pacific Affairs, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Business and Politics, Contemporary Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Studies Review, Economic and Political Studies, and the Australian Journal of Political Science. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the ASEAN Secretariat, and the US Department of State. His most recent books (all from Oxford University Press) are The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization in East Asia (co-authored with Richard F. Doner and Gregory W. Noble), The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia (co-edited with Saadia Pekkanen and Rosemary Foot), and the seventh edition of Global Political Economy (co-edited with Erin Hannah).
He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and an elected Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. In 2016, he received the International Studies Association’s International Political Economy Section’s Distinguished Scholar award.