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Brief Biography

From 1969 to 2003, George Perlin was a member of the Department teaching courses on Canadian and Comparative politics. From 2003 to 2013 he taught courses on international democratic development and Canadian democracy in the School of Policy Studies.  

He founded and was Director of the then Centre for the Study of Democracy at ����ֱ�� (now known as the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity) from 1993 to 2002.

From 2003 to 2006 Perlin was a Fellow at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) where he edited and contributed to a series of papers on Canada's policy for assistance to democratic development.  He has been a consultant on democracy assistance policy to agencies of the Canadian government and to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Perlin has also had experience as a practitioner in the delivery of democracy assistance as director of two CIDA-funded projects to establish a program of education in the study of democracy for the universities, technical colleges, and secondary schools of Ukraine.  In collaboration with Kyiv National Pedagogical University, the projects established courses on democracy in 250 universities and technical colleges and an estimated 20,000 high schools.

He co-authored and edited with a group of Ukrainian scholars three editions of a university textbook,   on the fundamentals of democracy (Osnovii Demokrati),  and was series editor for 15 supplementary texts, co-authoring five. He has also written extensively about Canadian politics.

In November 2008, he was elected as an international member of Ukraine's National Academy of Pedagogical Science.

Born in Oxbow, Saskatchewan on June 22, 1928, Stewart Fyfe died peacefully at Briargate Retirement Residence in Amherstview, Ontario on January 30, 2019. 

Stewart graduated with a BA and MA from ����ֱ�� and a PhD from Manchester University. Proud of his Scottish heritage and prairie roots, his life was dedicated to 'making a difference'. As a dedicated member of the ����ֱ�� community for over six decades, he taught generations of students about local government, created professional development programs for municipal staff, and provided counseling for students. Working as a consultant and an educator, his work took him to Europe and Russia and across Canada from Newfoundland to Whitehorse. He was heavily involved in local government reform in Ontario, including chairing the Commission which led to the formation of the Waterloo Region.

In Kingston, he was instrumental in the formation of the Art Collection Society and the City's Planning Department, which assisted with neighbourhood improvement projects and the City's early efforts in heritage conservation which became the foundation of the Ontario Heritage Act. For many years he was a member and Chair of Kingston's Planning Committee and the Cataraqui Region Conservation Authority. 

Stewart was a voracious reader, avid Gaels football fan and lover of cottage life with his dear family at Lake Sir John and Eagle Lake.  

Catherine M. Conaghan is a specialist in Latin American politics, with a focus on the Andean region. Her research has included extensive fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) is her latest book. Her earlier books are Restructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador (1988) and Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes (with James Malloy, 1994). She has been affiliated with the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Helen Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame, the North-South Institute of the University of Miami, and the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. She served as visiting Fulbright scholar in Peru in 1997. In 2000, she was appointed as the visiting Knapp Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of San Diego. Her publications include articles in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Studies in Comparative International Development. Her current research, a comparative study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, is entitled, “The Aftermath of Presidential Corruption in Latin America.” She received her doctorate from Yale University.

Brief Biography

Kim Richard Nossal went to school in Melbourne, Beijing, Toronto, and Hong Kong and attended the University of Toronto, receiving his PhD in 1977. In 1976 he joined the Department of Political Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he taught international relations and Canadian foreign policy, serving as chair of the Department from 1989–90 and 1992-1996. In 2001, he came to Queen’s University, heading the Department of Political Studies until 2009. He served as director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy from 2011 to 2013. From 2013 to 2015, he was the executive director of the Queen’s School of Policy Studies.

He has served as editor of International Journal, the quarterly journal of the Canadian International Council, Canada's institute of international affairs (1992-1997), and was president of the Canadian Political Science Association (2005-2006). He served as chair of the academic selection committee of the Security and Defence Forum of the Department of National Defence from 2006 to 2012. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal Military College of Canada. Professor Emeritus Nossal retired from ����ֱ�� Department of Political Studies in 2020.

Research Interests

Canadian politics; gender and politics; political communication; political behaviour; media framing of sexual violence; public opinion; and Indigenous politics 

Brief Biography

Elisha is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Studies. She is of Irish and Cherokee descent which deeply informs her program of study. Elisha studies Canadian Politics and Gender and Politics with a focus on the (mis)representation of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) in the media. Her doctoral research focuses on how traditional print media frames and how Indigenous communities frame MMIWG2S affect non-Indigenous Canadians' perceptions of and support for MMIWG2S. She hopes that her research will tell us more about how colonialism and racism perpetuate and silence the violence against Indigenous women and girls through media representation (or lack thereof). She also hopes that her research can be a modest step to decolonizing one of Canada’s oldest institutions: the media.

Elisha is also a passionate teacher, a dedicated researcher, and an advocate for gender equity in her academic and personal life. She is an active member of the Queen’s and Kingston communities at large. She has been an executive member of the Queen’s Female Leadership in Politics Conference since its inaugural year in 2015. She was the 2019 Co-Chair of the Political Studies Graduate Student Association (PSGSA) and in 2018 was the Co-Chair of the 2018 PSGSA annual graduate conference. She is also on the board of directors for the Autism Mentorship Program, a not-for-profit organization.

Teaching

POLS 212- Canadian Politics (Head Teaching Assistant) 

POLS 313- Political Communication (Teaching Assistant)

POLS 384- Research Methods (Teaching Assistant) 

POLS 385 – Introduction to Statistics (Teaching Assistant and Content Developer)

POLS 320 – First Nations Politics (Teaching Assistant)

POLS 367 – American Foreign Policy (Teaching Assistant)

POLS 391 – Electoral Systems (Course Co-Developer)

Research Interests

Canadian Politics; Courts and Politics; Canadian Federalism; Minority and Language Rights and Politics (Canada; UK); Aboriginal Rights

Current research: Official-Language Rights and Aboriginal Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada

Brief Biography

Professor Chouinard grew up in Labrador. She has been teaching at Royal Military College since 2017 and has been cross-appointed at ����ֱ�� in 2018. She received her PhD in Political Studies from the University of Ottawa (2016) and was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, as well as at the Chair of Celtic Languages, Literature, History and Antiquities, University of Edinburgh. She teaches in the fields of Canadian Politics, Comparative Politics, and Political Geography.

Her research interests focus on the relationship between courts and minorities in democratic systems. Her current research focuses on the Supreme Court of Canada's impact on the evolution of official-language rights and Aboriginal self-determination rights. She is also interested in territorial and non-territorial autonomy arrangements for national and linguistic minorities in the world.

Professor Chouinard has published in Ethnopolitics, the Language Rights Review, Linguistic Minorities and Society, and the International Journal of Canadian Studies, among others.

Selected Publications

“The judiciary’s impact and limits in official-language minority education policymaking: The legacy of Section 23”, in: Emmett Macfarlane (ed.), The Policy Impact of the Supreme Court of Canada, University of Toronto Press (forthcoming)

" Les tribunaux, lieu de pouvoir contre-majoritaire? Les minorités face au droit ", in: Karim Benyekhlef, Catherine Régis, and Daniel Weinstock (eds.), Sauvons la justice, Montréal: Del Busso, 2017.

“Quand le droit parle de sciences sociales: l’introduction de la complétude institutionnelle dans le droit linguistique canadien”, Language Rights Review, vol. 3, 2016, 60-93.

“Stateless Nations in a World of Nation-States”, in: Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2016, 54-66.

Research Focus

Terrorism and political violence; Sociology of religion; religion and violence; social movements; religion and politics in the Middle East; Religion and the public sphere; diaspora politics and activism; religion and media/social media; atheism and non-religion; hate movements and the far-right.

Brief Biography

Amarnath Amarasingam is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion, and is cross-appointed to the Department of Political Studies, at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. He is also a Senior Fellow with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. His research interests are in terrorism, radicalization and extremism, online communities, diaspora politics, post-war reconstruction, and the sociology of religion. He is the author of Pain, Pride, and Politics: Sri Lankan Tamil Activism in Canada (2015), and the co-editor of Sri Lanka: The Struggle for Peace in the Aftermath of War (2016). He has also published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, has presented papers at over 100 national and international conferences, and has written for The New York Times, The Monkey Case, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs. He has been interviewed on CNN, PBS Newshour, CBC, BBC, and a variety of other media outlets. He tweets at 

Amarasingam is an experienced field researcher, having conducted hundreds of interviews for his PhD dissertation on social movement activism, organizational dynamics, and youth identity in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. He also conducted over 50 interviews with former fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers) throughout the former war zones of Sri Lanka in 2013 and 2014. He has also conducted field research in Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Somalia, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. He co-directed a study on foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, based at the University of Waterloo, for six years during which he conducted numerous social media and in-person interviews with current and former foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, as well as parents and close friends of those who traveled to fight. 

Brief Biography

Dr. Surulola Eke is the latest Peacock Postdoctoral Fellow to join the Department of Political Studies. Working with supervisor Dr. Andrew Grant, his research agenda focuses on the linkages between autochthony, natural resources, and conflicts in West Africa. Dr. Eke has published on these linkages and related security governance themes in several scholarly journals, including Third World Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Peace Research, and African Security Review. His high-impact scholarship has resulted in many academic awards and fellowships, including the University of Manitoba’s most prestigious doctoral fellowship, which fully funded Dr. Eke’s graduate studies. The importance of Dr. Eke’s research agenda was further affirmed via the recipient of Canada’s most prestigious postdoctoral award, the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, which recognizes scholarly excellence and leadership in academic settings.

Teaching

POLS 380 Puzzles in Political Economy (Winter 2024)

POLS 867 Approaches to Global Governance (Winter 2024)

POLS 494 Topics in Political Studies: Global Climate Governance (Fall 2023)

Research Interests

Politics of majority–minority group relations; politics of artificial intelligence; nationalism, especially civic nationalism; migrant integration; multiculturalism; conflict regulation, especially consociational power-sharing; relational social science; academic integrity

Stephen Larin would be interested in supervising graduate students in the areas of nationalism, migration, or the politics of artificial intelligence.

Brief Biography

Stephen Larin is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Coordinator of the Internship in Political Studies, and the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity. Previously, he has been a Senior Researcher with the Institute for Minority Rights at Eurac Research in South Tyrol, Italy; an Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia; and a Visiting Researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Research

Dr. Larin's research is divided into two broad areas: the politics of majority–minority group relations and the politics of artificial intelligence.

The main focus of his research in the first area is the relationship between majority-group nationalism and minorities such as migrants and sub-state nations, and he is engaged in two ongoing projects. The first project focuses on the relationship between majority-group nationalism and migrant integration, especially the role of civic nationalism in so-called ‘civic integration’ policies (see, for example, “”). The second project deals with Italy’s predominantly German-speaking province of South Tyrol, and is currently focused on the possibility of revising the province's Autonomy Statute to include ‘Others’—those who do not want to declare membership in one of the three official linguistic groups, such as people from mixed-language families, migrants, and declaration objectors—in its executive proportionality rule. This change would shift South Tyrol from ‘corporate’ toward ‘liberal’ consociation, and could serve as a model for similar transitions in other cases (for the first statement of this proposal, see “”).

Dr. Larin’s research on the politics of artificial intelligence focuses on how AI affects the distribution of power, problems with using AI in public decision-making such as the violation of due process, how AI affects migrants and other minorities, and the relationship between AI and academic integrity. He has been teaching a fourth-year seminar on the politics of artificial intelligence since 2020.

Teaching

Dr. Larin teaches courses in comparative politics and political theory that also draw on international relations, sociology, and law. He was nominated for the Arts & Science Undergraduate Society’s W.J. Barnes Teaching Award in both 2019 and 2020, and the Alma Mater Society’s Frank Knox Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2020.

For detailed information about political studies courses and instructors, please refer to the Undergraduate and Graduate pages.  

Service (2024/2025)

• Colloquium Committee
• Departmental Committee
• Undergraduate Committee
• POLS University Research Ethics Board (UREB) Committee