Pepper Culpepper is Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. He is Vice-Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, where his research explores the junction between capitalism and democracy. Pepper is the Principal Investigator of a multimillion-pound Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. That research project – Banklash – is the first to use multiple tools of cutting-edge social science research to establish the link between interest group conflict, public opinion, and financial policymaking after the financial crisis of 2008. His academic book Quiet Politics and Business Power was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research, the most prestigious book prize awarded by the International Social Science Council and the European Consortium for Political Research. A recent article about his research in the Financial Times attracted more than one million Twitter/X views. His public commentary has appeared in the Conversation, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, the New Republic, Times Higher Education, and the Washington Post. Pepper was born in the southern United States. He obtained a PhD in political science from Harvard University, a BA from Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and an MLitt from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has previously taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and the European University Institute in Italy. He was an Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo and has held long-term visiting appointments in France and Germany. He speaks French, Italian and German.