He served as the director of Oxford's African Studies Centre, before moving to the University of Birmingham in January 2017 to become the professor of democracy and international development.
[3] Cheeseman's work initially focused on African politics, including his 2015 monograph Democracy in Africa.
[4] Further books followed, including Authoritarian Africa: Repression, Resistance and the Power of Ideas, with Jonathan Fisher in 2019, and The Moral Economy of Elections: Democracy, Voting, and Virtue, with Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis in 2020.
[7] Between 2013 and 2017, Cheeseman wrote a bi-weekly column for Kenya's Sunday Nation, covering topics such as elections, decentralization and corruption.
[19] Cheeseman's doctorate, The rise and fall of civil-authoritarianism in Africa: patronage, participation, and political parties in Kenya and Zambia,[20] was awarded the Arthur McDougall Dissertation Prize by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom for the Best Dissertation on Elections, Electoral Systems or Representation in 2008.
[23] In 2019, Cheeseman won the Joni Lovenduski Prize of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar.