Between Protection and Control: The Politics of Kin-State Activism in Central and Eastern Europe
Date
Thursday March 6, 20252:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
The Department of Political Studies Presents The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies Inaugural Lecture
Zsuzsa Csergő - Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies, ֱ Department of Political Studies
Between Protection and Control: The Politics of Kin-State Activism in Central and Eastern Europe
Thursday, March 6, 2025
2:30-4:00 PM
Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202
Light refreshments served
Biography:
Zsuzsa Csergő (PhD in Political Science, The George Washington University, 2000) is The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Before joining the Queen’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Program in U.S. and International Politics at the George Washington University. From 2013-2020, she was President of the , the largest international scholarly association in the field of nationalism and ethnicity studies. She currently serves as Director of the association’s online initiative, “.”
Dr. Csergő's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies. Her articles about nationalism, majority-minority relations, kin-state politics, and minority democratic agency in the EU context have appeared in leading journals in her field, including Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Policy, Publius, Nations and Nationalism, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Societies, and other venues. She is the author of Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2007), co-editor and co-author of collaborative volumes (books and special issues) focused on Europeanization and minority political agency, and Central and East European politics. She is currently writing a book about the sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states, based on comparative research on six linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Poles in Lithuania, and Russophones in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).
Dr. Csergő leads the comparative Minority Institutions Database, which officially launched in March, 2023. She is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative research project entitled “” (funded by SSHRC), focused on Montreal, Brussels, Belfast, and Vilnius. Additionally, Csergő is a General Editor of the , and a member of , hosted at the University of Glasgow.
To learn more about Dr. Csergő, visit her faculty profile.