Our Experts

Ruben Zaiotti is the director of the Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence, a Jean Monnet Chair in Public Diplomacy and Associate professor in the Political Science department at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). His main areas of interest are European Union politics, border control and immigration policy, social media and public diplomacy and transatlantic relations. Ruben Zaiotti is the author of the monograph “Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers” with University of Chicago Press and […]

Agnes Whitfield is a Full Professor in the Department of English at York University and the author of numerous publications in the field of translation theory and cultural exchange. Her current research projects focus on policy models for reciprocal cultural exchange, the history of literary translators with special interest in women translators, the concepts of gender and voice in literary translation, and literary translation exchange between English and French within Canada and between Canada and Europe. She has led a […]

Stephen Ross’s research interests range over the fields of modernism and literary or critical theory. He has in the past published research on individual modernist authors, modernism at large, and the field of modernist studies. In all his work, he tries to work through how theory can help us understand cultural production, and – importantly – vice versa. He is at present keenly interested in how modernism emerged as a distinctly euro-anglo-american phenomenon, and how it is again being exported […]

Dennis Pilon’s work touches on many aspects of comparative elections and democratization, including questions of institutional reform, voter turnout, citizen engagement, deliberation and media, and the role of economic inequality in these processes. Research Interests: Canadian politics, BC politics, Comparative democratization and electoral reform, Media and citizen engagement, Class analysis, Working class politics, Sexuality politics, and Democratization and democratic reform in western countries

John Peter Oleson’s research focuses on ancient technology, particularly ships, harbours, and water-supply systems. Since 1971 he has directed or participated in underwater excavations at a number of Roman harbour sites in Italy, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. Between 1986 and 2005  Dr. Oleson directed excavations at the site of Humayma, ancient Hawara, a Nabataean, Roman, and Early Islamic settlement in Jordan’s southern desert. He has published 10 books and more than 95 articles concerning ancient technology, marine archaeology, the Nabataeans, and […]

Assem Dandashly is a Lecturer in European Public Policy at Maastricht University. Prior to that, Assem was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe “TheTransformative Power of Europe” Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a PhD in Political Science (2012) from the University of Victoria, BC Canada. Assem’s dissertation is entitled “Euro Adoption Strategies in Central Europe: The Cases of Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland”. He moves beyond the Economic cost/benefit analysis and constructivism and tries to deal with the topic from […]

A specialist of Renaissance Literature, Hélène Cazes researches the definitions and practices of Humanism -the word itself being the self-description of learned communities, bound in cross-linguistic and often cross-religious networks. She is currenlty tracking the concept of friendship, a foundational concept for newly-born Republics of Letters in Europe (16th and 18th c.).   Research Interests: Renaissance Literature; Humanism; Medieval Literature; Contemporary French; Literature; Graphic Novels

Anna Korteweg is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on citizenship, constructions of national identity in public and parliamentary debates on immigrant integration, and the ways in which the problematic of immigrant integration is defined in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity and national origin. She has published in various scholarly journals, including Theory & Society, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Gender & Society as well as […]

Matt Pollard is interested in the relationship between the visual arts and literature, as well as the historical and political contexts of (inter)cultural expression, ranging from Nietzsche reception in the popular culture of the English-speaking world, sport as spectacle, and the ongoing debates regarding the overlap between mass media, propaganda and reportage. At present Dr. Pollard is a member of a four-author team creating a two-year textbook for teaching German language and / through culture. Research Interests: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century […]

Sara Beam is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on the history of social life and cultural values in early modern Europe.  In 2007, she published a study of political satire during the Renaissance entitled Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France, which won the Roland Bainton Book Prize. More recent publications on gender and the history of criminal justice include “Adultère, indices médicaux et recul de la torture à Genève […]

Edelgard Mahant has studied the European Union for the past forty years. She has a special interest in French politics, the history of the European Union and the human rights work of the Council of Europe. She has a long standing interest in the European Union’s special relationship with Africa. Research Interests: European Union, Foreign policy analysis, History of European integration, The EU in Africa, Politics of international trade, Foreign policy of the states of southern Africa, The human rights […]

Antje Ellermann specializes in comparative politics and comparative public policy, in particular in the area of immigration, with a regional focus on Europe and North America. Her past research, which was funded by the U.S. Social Science Research Council, examined the comparative politics of deportation in Germany and the United States. Her findings show that cross-national variation in deportation outcomes reflects significant – and institutionally determined – differences in the capacity of these two states to implement coercive, and politically […]

Anna Gora is a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology where she works on the EU2020 project, Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law (RECONNECT). Her PhD research at Carleton University examined the politicization of the EU in Ireland comparatively between citizens and the mass media. She previously worked as a research assistant at Carleton University on projects relating to multilevel legitimacy in the EU, the politicization of the Euro crisis […]

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly is Professor at the School of Public Administration and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre at the University of Victoria. Dr, Brunnet-Jailly holds the Jean Monnet Chair in Innovative Governance. He is also the the Lead of the Jean Monnet Network Border/Migration and the Lead of the  SSHRC Borders in Globalization Partnership project (BIG). Currently, his research focuses on comparative and interdisciplinary theorization of cross-border urban regions & implications for European integration. Media Experience: Dr. Brunet-Jailly has an extensive outreach […]

Dagmar Soennecken’s research focuses on comparative politics and public policy in the EU and North America. She is particularly interested in questions concerning law and the courts as well as citizenship and migration. Dagmar is currently working on two major research projects: The first has generated a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Empowered Courts and the Fate of Refugees Compared, and a select number of articles. It investigates the growing influence of the judiciary over refugee determinations in Canada and in […]

Laurence McFalls (PhD Harvard) is Professor in Political Science and Director for the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES) at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include: Political and Social Theories; Max Weber; Military-Humanitarian Interventions; Political Culture; Epistomology and Methodology in the social sciences; and Western and Central-Eastern Europe. He is co-director of the Groupe de recherche sur les interventions militaires et humanitaires (GRIMH). Research Interests: German Unification, Max Weber, and Military-humanitarian Interventions