On 1 October 1996, he took office as principal of Linacre College. He retired in September 2010. He was appointed pro-vice-chancellor in 1997, becoming in 2000 pro-vice-chancellor (academic services and university collections).
In 1999 he was appointed professor of early modern social history. He is also a member of the Environmental Change Institute advisory board and a former chairman of the curators of the University Libraries.
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Paul Slack, From Reformation to improvement: public welfare in early modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998; 1999)
Paul Slack, The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; reprinted with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
Paul Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988)
Paul Slack, "Poverty and politics in Salisbury 1597-1666", in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds, Crisis and order in English towns, 1500-1700: essays in urban history (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp.164–203
Paul Slack: "Social Policy and the Constraints of Government, 1547–58", in Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler, eds, The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560 (London: Macmillan), pp.94–115
Paul Slack, The Traditional community under stress (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1977)
Editor
Paul Slack, ed., Environments and historical change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Paul Slack, ed., Poverty in early-Stuart Salisbury (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1975)
Paul Slack, ed., Rebellion, popular protest, and the social order in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Co-editor
Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack, eds, Civil histories: essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds, Crisis and order in English towns, 1500-1700: essays in urban history (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972)
Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English towns in transition 1500-1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976)
Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds, Epidemics and ideas: essays on the historical perception of pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Julie Trottier and Paul Slack, eds, Managing water resources past and present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Paul Slack and Ryk Ward, eds, The peopling of Britain: the shaping of a human landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds, Public duty and private conscience in seventeenth-century England: essays presented to G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
