New Faces 2018

July 16, 2018

A very warm welcome to all our new faculty who officially joined the political science department on July 1!

Martha Balaguera (PhD, UMass Amherst) joins us from UCSD, where she was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies. Her work focuses on social movements with an emphasis on transborder forms of activism in the Americas. Her current project examines how local communities and marginalized groups respond to forced displacement across Mexico.

Randy Besco (pictured) (PhD, Queens University) studies voting and elections, race and ethnicity, and political psychology. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Duke University and a postdoctoral Fellow at UofT. His research has been published by Party Politics and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. His book, Interests and Identities in Racialized Voting is forthcoming with UBC Press.

Connor Ewing (PhD, UT Austin) comes to Toronto from the University of Virginia, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy. Spanning the fields of Public Law and American Politics, his research focuses on constitutional law and theory, American political thought, and American constitutional development.

Jessica Green (PhD, Princeton) comes to Toronto from NYU. Her interests are climate governance, carbon markets, and the role of nonstate actors with a research focus on transnational private regulation. Her book, Rethinking Private Authority: Agents and Entrepreneurs in Global Environmental Governance, was published by Princeton University Press in January 2014.

Filiz Kahraman (PhD, University of Washington) comes to Toronto from Georgetown University where she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mortara Center for International Studies. Her research has appeared in Law & Social Inquiry and is forthcoming in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

Egor Lazarev (PhD, Columbia) studies state-building and the rule of law, social and political legacies of conflict, and ethnic and religious politics. His primary geographic foci are the Muslim-majority regions of the former Soviet Union. His research has been published in World Politics, World Development, and Political Science Research & Methods.

Jon R. Lindsay (PhD, MIT) is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science at UofT and Interim Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs. His research examines the interaction of technology and international security, with a focus on cybersecurity, innovation and strategy.

Andrew Sabl (PhD, Harvard) is a political theorist who studies democratic theory, toleration, and realist political thought. He comes to Toronto from Yale and has previously taught at UCLA, Vanderbilt, and (visiting) Harvard, Princeton, and Williams College. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics (both Princeton press).

Matthew J. Walton (PhD, University of Washington) has for the past five years directed the program on Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia. His book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press.