Professor James Mayall (14 April 1937 - 5 November 2025)

It is with sadness that we announce the death of our former colleague, James Mayall. He taught International Relations in our department between 1966 and 1997, starting as a lecturer and rising to become Professor in the 1990s. He served as our Department Convenor (Head of Department) from 1991 to 1994.

In 1997, he left LSE to become the inaugural Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. A remarkably wide-ranging teacher and scholar, James is best known for Nationalism in International Society (Cambridge University Press, 1990), which remains one of the most accomplished and influential studies of the subject.

The University of Cambridge is creating a tribute page and James's students and colleagues are welcome to submit tributes. If you have something you would like to share, please email communications@polis.cam.ac.uk and they will add it to this webpage.