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Professor Emeritus Bruce Berman passed away on January 6, 2024 in Kingston, at the age of 81.  His obituary is available through the James Reid Funeral Home.   

After spending 1968-69 at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi, and in 1970 as an instructor at Yale, Professor Berman was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at ����ֱ�� in 1971.

Professor Berman's major field of interest was in the political economy of development, with special reference to Africa. He conducted research in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. During his years at ����ֱ��, he taught undergraduate courses in African politics, the politics of science and technology, and a graduate seminar in development theory. Professor Berman was widely acknowledged as one of Canada's leading experts on African politics: he served as president of the Canadian Association of African Studies from 1990-91, and co-chair of the national program committee for the 1994 annual meeting of the African Studies Association of the U.S. In 2003 he was elected vice-president of the ASA and became president of the ASA in November 2004.

Professor Berman published widely in the field of African politics, with two of his books winning prizes: Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: the Dialectic of Domination (1990) won the Joel Gregory Prize in 1991, and Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (1992) won the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize in 1994. More recent publications include Critical Perspectives on Politics and Socio-Economic Development in Ghana (edited with W. Tettey and K. Puplampu, Brill, 2003), Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa (edited with W. Kymlicka and D. Eyoh, Ohio University Press, and James Currey, 2004), and “‘A Palimpsest of Contradictions': Ethnicity, Class and Politics in Africa,” in the International Journal of African Historical Studies (2004).

Students whose doctoral theses were supervised by Professor Berman are now in government service or teaching and researching in Canada, the West Indies, South Africa, Kenya, and Rwanda. In 2003 he was nominated for the Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award offered by the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Professor Berman was a founding member of the Research Group on Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Citizenship (RGoNEMC) at ����ֱ��.  He retired from ����ֱ�� in 2003.  

Thesis

Divided We Fall: Cohesion and Fragmentation in Excluded Minority Movements

Biography

PhD Political Studies (����ֱ��)

MA (Middlebury Institute of International Studies, 2017)

MA (Brandeis University, 2015)

BA (Brandeis University, 2014)

Rida was born in Tayibe and raised in Jaffa, Palestine. He is interested in the factors that facilitate and obstruct political mobilization among indigenous and national groups, with an emphasis on the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Rida received B.A and M.A degrees from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2014, 2015), and an additional M.A from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, CA (2017). Before matriculating at Queen’s, he worked as a data coordinator at B’tselem, a leading civil society organization that covers human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Terrirotires. In his spare time, he writes op-eds, and he s.

Awards

2022  Ontario Graduate Scholarship

2022  R. Samuel McLaughlin Fellowship

2020  Mitacs Research Training Award

2018 – 2022  Principal's International Doctoral Award

2018 – 2022  Queen’s Graduate Award

Teaching

Teaching fellow:

POLS 348 – Middle East Politics (Fall 2021, 2022)

Teaching assistant:

POLS 285 – Introduction to Statistics (Winter 2023)

POLS 244 – Democracy and Democratization (Winter 2022)

POLS 261 – International Politics (Fall 2020)

POLS 242 – Contemporary Regimes (Winter 2019, 2020)

POLS 243 – State, Nation and Democracy (Fall 2018, 2019, 2020)

POLS 285 – Introduction to Statistics (Winter 2023)

Dr. Jayant Lele was Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Political Studies, Sociology, and Global Development Studies at ����ֱ�� in Kingston, Canada. He has taught courses on Critical Social Theory, Comparative Politics of Developing Societies, and political sociology. After post-graduate education from Poona University, he was awarded a doctoral studies fellowship by the Ford Foundation and a research fellowship by the American Institute of Indian Studies. He held a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University. He served as the Head of the Sociology Department, and as the Coordinator and Chair of the program for Study in National and International Development. He was also the founder coordinator of the Department of Global Development Studies at ����ֱ��. He was Visiting Professor at the Centre for International Studies, Cornell University, and at the department of Politics of Poona University and has been a Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. He served as the President of the Canadian Association of South Asian Studies and as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Asian Studies Association of Canada. He was the Resident Director of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in New Delhi from 1981-82 and was its President between 1996 and 1998. He received senior faculty fellowships of the Institute in 1981-82 for the study of the social history of Maharashtra and in 1988-89 for the study of language and Society in South Asia. Professor Lele was the Convener of the Evaluation Programme of the International Centre for the Advancement of Community-based Rehabilitation - ICACBR - (a CIDA Centre of Excellence at Queen’s University) and served as a member of its Board of Directors, on its Taskforce on Sustainability, and its representative on the Disability Subcommittee of the United Nations Regional Interorganizational Committee for the Asia Pacific (RICAP).

Professor Lele’s recent research includes work on colonial and post-colonial analyses of image-worship in India and changes in the political economy of districts of Maharashtra. Professor Lele's research interests included studies of rural and national politics in India and of party politics in Canada, evaluation of public policy processes and community-based programs, critical reinterpretation of the modernity of tradition as well as the political economy of India, Southeast Asia, and Canada. He is the author, co-author, or editor of a number of articles and books including, Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements, Elite Pluralism and Class Rule, Language and Society, State, and Society in India, Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics, Hindutva: The Emergence of the Right, Unravelling the Asian Miracle, Asia: Who Pays for Growth?, Globalization and civil society in Asia (Palgrave 2004) and Democratic Transitions and Social Movements in Asia(Palgrave 2004), Some Landmarks in the History of Ideas (U). The Landmarks volume was translated into Marathi and published by Unique Academy in 2013.