Julia Black

Dame Julia Mary Black (born 29 January 1967) is the strategic director of innovation and a professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She was the interim director of the LSE, a post she held from September 2016 until September 2017, at which time Minouche Shafik took over the directorship. She is the president of the British Academy, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences, and became the academy's second female president in July 2021 for a four-year term. In September 2024, she became the tenth Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford.

Early life and education Black was born on 29 January 1967 in Waterloo, Lancashire, England. She graduated with a first-class undergraduate degree in jurisprudence from the University of Oxford in 1988. In 1994, she completed her DPhil at Lincoln College, Oxford, with a thesis on Conduct of Business Rules in the financial sector. Her primary research interests are regulation of the financial services sector and financial risk.

Career Black is strategic director of innovation, professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the general editor of the Modern Law Review. and has been actively involved with developing the LSE’s research collaborations with STEM disciplines, particularly around health and data science. She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2015 and the president-elect since 2020. She has written extensively on regulatory issues in a number of areas, The independent review, which was published in 2016, was designed to make recommendations on how the REF worked in future.

Outside of academia, Black has had a number of non-executive and advisory roles for many organisations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the UK National Audit Office, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the Financial Services Authority, and the Law Commission. At the SRA, she was an independent board member from 2014 to 2018 and chaired its policy committee. Currently, she is an external member of the Prudential Regulation Committee and an external member of the SONIA oversight committee at the Bank of England, with the term of her appointment running from November 2018 to November 2021. She has been a senior independent member of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which is responsible for research and innovation funding in the UK, since 2017 and is also a member of the Council of Science and Technology, which advises the prime minister on science and technology policy issues across government, and recently joined the board of governors of the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2025.