Dr Dominic Burbidge is a permanent Lecturer in Politics for Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, and a Research Coordinator in the Faculty of Law. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics in Princeton University. Dr Burbidge additionally serves as Director of the Canterbury Institute.
Dr Burbidge’s research focuses on social trust, human coordination and civic virtue. He recently published the book An Experiment in Devolution and is currently working to apply insights from virtue ethics to political theory, particularly the theory and practice of civic virtue. Dr Burbidge believes that the promotion of trustworthiness is key to stable and legitimate government, and that the best set of resources for understanding trustworthiness lie in virtue theory. In this vein, he seeks to develop insights from Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and MacIntyre in exploring the role of virtue in the public sphere. Broadly, this draws on the resurgent interest in virtue theory within philosophy (Anscombe, MacIntyre, Annas, Hursthouse) and begins its application to politics. Dr Burbidge teaches theory of politics.