Clockwise from top right: Terri Givens, Maria Popova, Amy Janzwood, Daniel Béland.
The Department of Political Science looks forward to welcoming alumni/ae back to campus, and invites you to join us for a conversation about what's going on in the world!
Four members of the Department's faculty will analyze current problems and events, drawing on their respective areas of expertise. Daniel Béland will reflect on the eight years that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party have spent in power. Terri Givens will speak about the contemporary politics of immigration and race, the rise of anti-immigrant political parties, and the electoral consequences of their campaigns. Amy Janzwood will offer reflections on climate and energy policy in Canada in light of the devastating wildfires, and the current political context. Maria Popova will discuss the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war and its significance to European security and the international order. Jacob Levy will moderate.
Friday, October 20
2-3:30 pm
McGill Faculty Club, 3450 rue McTavish
Gold Room
Space is limited; RSVP and register at http://www.alumni.mcgill.ca/events/PoliSciHC2023
About the speakers
Daniel Béland is James McGill Professor of Political Science and Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill. He is currently working on research projects focusing on issues ranging from universal social policy and health care reform to the role of ideas in policy development and the relationship between fiscal policy and welfare state development. Professor Béland holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he returned as a visiting scholar in the spring of 2014. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the National University of Singapore, a visiting professor at the University of Bremen, the University of Helsinki, the University of Southern Denmark, and a Fulbright Scholar at The George Washington University and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Before joining McGill University in January 2019, he held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) at the University of Saskatchewan (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy). Professor Béland currently serves as Editor (French) of the Canadian Journal of Sociology and Executive Editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. In 2022 his work to bring understanding of political events was recognized with the Principal's Prize for Public Engagement through Media in the category of Established Academic.
Terri Givens is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean of Arts at McGill; she was previously the CEO of the Center for Higher Education Leadership. Professor Givens has held leadership positions as Vice Provost at the University of Texas at Austin and Provost of Menlo College (first African American and woman); as well as professorships at University of Texas at Austin, and University of Washington. She was the founding director at the Center for European Studies at the University of Texas. At Menlo College she led the faculty and staff in developing programs for first generation students, updating curriculum and creating infrastructure for evidence-based assessment. She is the author/editor of books and articles on immigration policy, European politics, and the politics of race. Her most recent book are the memoir, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, and the comparative political science study The Roots of Racism: The Politics of White Supremacy in the US and Europe.
Amy Janzwood is Assistant Professor of Political Science and in the Bieler School of Environment at McGill. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2020. Previously, she held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the comparative politics of energy and the environment, including the political economy of energy transitions, the contested politics of fossil fuel production, and the policy pathways that move us towards more just and sustainable energy systems. Professor Janzwood is on the Steering Committee of the Women & Inclusivity in Sustainable Energy Research (WISER) network and a member of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN). She is also affiliated with the Cascade Institute and the Earth System Governance Project.
Maria Popova is Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill. She is co-director of the Jean Monnet Centre She holds a BA in Spanish Literature and Government from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. She has lived and conducted research across Eastern Europe and Eurasia and its various regime incarnations—from growing up in Bulgaria before 1989, through interviewing judges and lawyers in Russia and Ukraine for dissertation research in the 2000s, to her current attempt to disentangle real from fake anti-corruption efforts in Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine. Popova’s work explores the intersection of politics and law in the region, specifically the rule of law, judicial reform, political corruption, populist parties, and legal repression of dissent. Popova’s book, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies (Cambridge UP, 2012), won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture. This year Professor Popova's contributions to public knowledge about the Russian invasion of Ukraine were recognized with the Principal's Prize for Public Engagement through Media in the category of Established Academic. Her book coauthored with Oxana Shevel, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States, will be published in January.
Jacob Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, Chair of the Department of Political Science, an associate member of the Department of Philosophy, and coordinator of the Research Group on Constitutional Studies at McGill.
About the Department
With over 1400 undergraduates in the major and honours programs, over 80 students pursuing the MA, and over 50 enrolled for the Ph.D., Political Science has grown very rapidly to become the largest program in the Faculty of Arts at all levels. Its distinguished and award-winning faculty includes four Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada and four members of the Royal Society's College of New Scholars (as well as two retired professors emeritus who are also Fellows). With seven new professors joining the faculty since 2020, Political Science is in the midst of a major push to ensure that its research strengths are keeping pace with new developments in both the discipline and the world. Those new professors bring expertise in climate change and energy policy, indigenous politics, Black politics, the politics of immigration, comparative racial politics, and rising nationalism, among other topics. At the same time the department is working to maintain traditional areas of academic excellence including the study of security, conflict, and peace; global trade and international political economy; political theory and constitutional studies; and elections and voting in democracies. Members of the faculty and graduate students alike also work to bring their academic expertise to bear in public discussion, trying to make accurate information available in an era when misinformation of many varieties is seemingly constantly more common. The QS University ranking of the study of political science evaluates the department as #40 in the world, #18 in North America, and #2 in Canada.
Giving to the department
Political Science depends on the support of alumni/ae, making gifts large and small, to maintain and expand its programs for undergraduates; to provide first-rate training for graduate students; and to recruit and retain an excellent faculty who keep the department at the forefront of understanding the political world. Recent major gifts include $50,000 from Eren Eren, BA '09, to recruit and support MA students in North American politics and in political theory; and $250,000 from the Lemieux Family Foundation for dissertation completion fellowships for Ph.D. students. All together, more than 20% of our graduate student funding comes from philanthropic gifts, mostly from alumni/ae.
Giving supports faculty hiring as well. A $5 million gift to Arts from G. Garvin Brown IV, BA’91, and his wife Steffanie Diamond Brown has established the Diamond-Brown Chair in Democratic Studies, which has allowed us the extraordinary opportunity to hire Professor Juan Pablo Luna to lead our work in the study of democratic governance and its challenges.
Smaller gifts are crucial to allow a rapidly growing department to handle many needs at all levels, from unexpected opportunities for student activities to giving prospective faculty members one extra trip to visit Montreal to help them see its appeal and decide to join us. Those small gifts provided much-needed flexibility, a flexibility that is otherwise hard to come by under the budgeting rules that govern public universities in Québec. We are very grateful for gifts large and small that allow us to continue to provide an excellent educational and research environment!