Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic) Mark F. Green announced on Monday the appointment of Sandra den Otter to the position of Vice-Provost (International) for a two-year term, effective Aug. 1, 2020.
In this new position, Dr. den Otter will work closely with Principal and Vice-Chancellor Patrick Deane and Provost Green on the strategic direction of international initiatives at Queen’s. Dr. den Otter will draw on her experience in working with partners across the university to develop collaborations and establish new partnerships for student mobility, research, and research mobilization.
The international portfolio will benefit from Dr. den Otter’s previous experience as Associate Vice-Principal (Research and International), Associate Vice-Principal (Research), and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. In addition to leading numerous projects and initiatives in the research portfolio, she advanced equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigeneity in research at Queen’s, including the Canada Research Chair program. She also led the development of research collaborations across the funding agencies, including the New Frontiers programs, and has supported Queen’s researchers through internal funding programs.
Dr. den Otter’s knowledge and expertise have been critical in helping the university respond to COVID-19. As the pandemic escalated earlier this year, she guided the support for exchange students facing disruptions to their travel and their academic study, and led the portfolio in re-imagining virtual forms of international engagement. She also assisted with mobilizing the COVID-19 rapid research funding.
Dr. den Otter, a professor in the Department of History, researches and teaches the history of Britain and the world in the 18th to 20th centuries, with particular expertise in the history of ideas of social welfare and inequality, and colonial law and cultures. Following doctoral studies in the Faculty of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Dr. den Otter held a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She has also held a research fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge. In addition to her investigation of legal cultures in colonial South Asia, a new research project explores humanitarianism in the 19th-century world. She is the co-editor of the Journal of British Studies (Cambridge University Press), the premier journal for scholars of British history in North America.