Professor Dariusz Wójcik

Dariusz Wójcik is an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment. Prior to this he was Professor of Economic Geography from 2007 until 2023. He is an economic geographer, specializing in financial geography. He has published six books and over one hundred articles and book chapters in leading journals and edited volumes, in geography, financial economics, political economy, and sustainability. He has been awarded 15 grants with a total value of over £3.6 million, funded by organisations in the UK, EU, China and Australia. His contribution to research has been recognized by nominations to the editorial boards of several journals, including Economic Geography, the Journal of Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Journal of Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development. He held visiting appointments at universities in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney. In 2015 he chaired the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography, which gathered over 670 delegates from more than 60 countries, and is a member of the Global Conference on Economic Geography Committee. He is also the founder and inaugural chair of the Global Network on Financial Geography, a research network with over 800 members all over the world, organising conferences, seminars, summer schools, a working paper series and other activities dedicated to financial geography. Beyond academia he has applied his research to influence financial management, corporate governance, and policies at public and private institutions. His research has been reported in the China Daily, Financial Times, Financial News, the Sunday Times, Forbes, RTÉ Ireland and the BBC World Service. Financial Times recently referred to his work with the words:

"Now it is the turn of geographers" (John Authers, FT, 20 August 2015, page 28)

Dariusz has a Master's Degree in Geography from Jagiellonian University (1997), Cracow, a Master's Degree in Economics from the Cracow University of Economics (1996), and an MSc in Finance and Banking from Stockholm University (1996). He came to Oxford in 1998 as a scholar of the Open Society Institute and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and was awarded the University Studentship in association with Jesus College for a DPhil, completed in 2003 with a thesis entitled "Corporate Governance and Capital Market Integration in Europe: an Economic Geography Perspective". From 2003 to 2005 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford and an outside Lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Between January 2006 and June 2007 he was a Lecturer at the Department of Geography, the University College London. He was appointed a Lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment and a Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford in July 2007. In 2021 Dariusz was awarded a Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Dariusz Wójcik's research combines insights derived from geography, economics, political economy, sociology and anthropology and is based on both quantitative and qualitative research methods, including elite interviews. In 2016 Dariusz was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator Grant of €2m for the project Cities in Global Financial Networks: Finance and Development in the 21st Century. This study focuses on how financial and business services, including law, accounting, and business consulting, have been affected by the global financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis, and how they are changing in response to new financial regulation, the rise of the Global South, and the digital revolution. The project develops the theory of Global Financial Networks, creates the first Atlas of Finance ever published, and investigates the impacts of finance on urban, regional, and global development in terms of growth, inequality, and sustainability.

His recent research projects include:

• Securing the Future of the Financial Industry via Improved Gender Diversity, SWIFT Institute, Brussels, with Kristina Kämpfer
• Enhancing Hong Kong's Attractiveness as an International Financial Centre, The Research Grants Council Hong Kong, with Professors Douglas Arner and Simon Zhao
• The end of investment bank capitalism? Mapping the global securities industry, Leverhulme Trust, with Duncan MacDonald-Korth
• Securities markets, international financial centres and regional resilience, European Commission, with Dr Sabine Dörry
• International competitiveness of Australia's financial services sector: fulfilling the mandate of the Financial System Inquiry, Centre for International Finance and Regulation, Sydney, with Professor Eric Knight and Professor Phillip O'Neill

He is currently working on:

• Cities in Global Financial Networks: Finance and Development in the 21st Century (CityNet), funded by the European Research Council (www.citynet21.org)
• The Financial Geography of Green Finance Policy, Climate Works Foundation, with Dr Theodor Cojoianu, Dr Michael Urban and Professor Andreas Hoepner

His most recent research outputs are available as working papers on the Social Science Research Network and on www.citynet21.org.

Undergraduate Teaching

At the undergraduate level Dariusz gave lectures on various aspects of economic geography and convenes the 'Geographies of Finance' option. He was a tutor at St Peter's College, where he taught and supervised dissertations of over 50 students since 2007.

At the graduate level Dariusz has supervised over 20 MSc students, and 20 DPhil students, in addition to mentoring visiting research students and postdoctoral researchers.