New Appointments

April 25, 2022

Congratulations to two of our faculty members who have recently been appointed to new positions.

Dickson Eyoh has been appointed as Acting Principal of New College effective July 1, 2022 for a one year term, while Edward Schatz has been appointed as Director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy for a 5 year term effective July 1, 2022.

Professor Dickson Eyoh was born and raised in Cameroon and educated in the United States (Rhodes College in Memphis) and at the University of Toronto (MA in Political Economy) and York University (PhD in Political Science). He is currently Associate Professor of Political Science and African Studies. Before returning to the University of Toronto, he was Lecturer in Political Science, University of Jos in Nigeria and Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science, York University. He has held visiting fellowships at the Institute of African Studies at University of Cape Town, African Institute of South Africa, and most recently was Carnegie Visiting Diaspora Scholar at the Institute of African Studies and Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Legon.

His research interests include political economy of development, state-society relations in Africa, identities and politics in Africa, and Africanist discourses on development. He has published widely in journals such as African Studies Review, Development and Change, Canadian Journal of African Studies and Research on African Literatures. He has co-edited Encyclopedia of 20th Century African History (with Paul Zeleza), Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa (with Bruce Berman and Will Kymlicka), and Decentralization and the Politics of Urban Development in West Africa (with Richard Stren).

Professor Eyoh has rich and varied experiences as an academic administrator, including serving for 14 years as director of African Studies (1993 – 2001, 2011 – 2017 and 2022), as mentor to students from Africa in the MasterCard Foundation Program (2013 – 2021) and as Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science (2017 – present).

Professor Edward Schatz holds a PhD and an MA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a BA in Soviet and East European Studies from Yale University. After graduating with his PhD in 2000, Professor Schatz was appointed Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Illinois University in 2001. In 2005, he joined the University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UTM. He was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2008 and then promoted to the rank of Professor in 2021.

He is also the Director of the Eurasia Initiative at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) and a core faculty member at CERES. His research addresses various topics about politics and society in ex-Soviet Eurasia, particularly the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He has published Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (Stanford 2021), as well as Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (Pittsburgh 2017) and Modern Clan Politics (Washington 2004). He has conducted regular fieldwork in Central Asian states since 1998. Schatz speaks Russian and is proficient in French, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Spanish, and Uzbek.

At UTM, he has taught a wide range of courses including European Politics, Russian Politics, Eurasia’s New Authoritarianisms, Anti-Americanism in Global Politics, among many others. For the PhD Program in political science, he regularly teaches Qualitative Methods, Central Asian Politics and Society, and the core Comparative Politics course. For CERES, he co-supervises the Major Research Paper course. He previously served as Chair of the Department of Political Science, UTM (2012 – 18) and as Acting Director of CERES (2020 – 21).

Photo: Professor Edward Schatz