Professor Michael Cox is a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS. He was Director of LSE IDEAS between 2008 and 2019 and now holds a senior fellowship. He is also Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE.

He was appointed to a Chair at the LSE in 2002, having previously held positions in the UK at The Queen's University of Belfast and the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth. He helped establish the Cold War Studies Centre at the LSE in 2004 and later co-founded LSE IDEAS in 2008 with Arne Westad.

Professor Cox, as well as his positions at LSE is Associate Fellow for the US and the Americas Programme at Chatham House, an advisor to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and as Guest Professor at CERIS. He regularly lectures to universities world-wide as well as to government bodies and many private companies. He has previously served as Chair of the United States Discussion Group at Chatham House, as Senior Fellow at the Nobel Institute in Oslo; as Visiting Professor at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies in Canberra, Australia, and as Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research. 

He is the author, editor and co-editor of several volumes including works on the Cold War, US foreign policy, the former Soviet Union, war and peace in Northern Ireland and the international thought of E. H. Carr. His most recent work includes a centennial edition of J. M. Keynes’s, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace' (Palgrave, 2019), a collection of his own essays ‘Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden' (Bristol University Press, 2022), ‘Afghanistan: Long War to Forgotten Peace' (LSE Press, 2022) and Ukraine: Russia’s War and the Future of Global Order' ( LSE Press, 2023).