John Loughlin (born 1948) is a Fellow and Tutor of St Edmund's College, Cambridge and a Senior Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer in Politics, University of Cambridge. At St Edmund's College he is Director of the Von Hugel Institute, a research institute dedicated to the study of Catholic Social Thouoght. He was previously Professor of Politics at Cardiff University, where he is now an Honorary Professor, and European Studies Centre Visiting Research Fellow at St Antony's College Oxford in 2005-6. In 2009 he was elected Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Queen Mary University of London. He has also been elected a Member of the Residential Colloquium at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton (2010). In June 2009 he was elected Visiting Fellow at St Edmond's College, Cambridge, England.BackgroundLoughlin was born in Belfast and later spent several years as a Trappist monk in Ireland. After leaving the monastery in 1974 he pursued further studies in French and Politics. He completed a Doctorate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute Florence Italy in 1987.Academic achievementsThe Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå University Sweden, has conferred on him an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) in "recognition of his great contribution to research in European politics and local and regional governance". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Universities of Umea, Sweden and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Aix-en-Provence. He was a Visiting Fellow at Merton College Oxford in 2004 and a Fellow of the Royal Flemish Society for Belgium for Arts and Sciences in 2005. He has held Visiting Professorships and Fellowships in the following universities: Sciences Po, Paris; the European University Institute, Florence; the University of Santiago da Compostella; the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels.John Loughlin is a member of the Committee of Independent Experts on regional and local democracy of the Council of Europe.He chaired a committee of experts on Regional and Local Democracy in the EU for the Committee of the Regions. He also chaired the Advisory Group of Experts on Decentralization of UN Habitat which drew up a set of guidelines on decentralization approved by UN-Habitat in Nairobi in 2007.