Rachel Laforest Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Canadian and Quebec politics; comparative politics; social policy; state-civil society relations; governance; citizen engagement

Rachel Laforest would be interested in supervising graduate students in the areas of ​​​​​social policy with a focus on marginalized communities - that includes a range of topics such as mental health, disability, homelessness, poverty, childcare, immigration, and education. I’m also interested in supervising students that have an interest in citizen engagement and the way that community groups and civil society organizations help bring citizen voices to the policy table. Finally, because I’m interested in social policy, my research also touches on issues of federalism and intergovernmental relations. I could supervise students interested in provincial comparisons.

Brief Biography

Rachel Laforest (Ph.D. Carleton) is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on Canadian politics, with a particular interest in how civil society groups mobilize to influence social policy dynamics. She is currently conducting a comparative analysis of poverty reduction strategies developed across Canada. Her work examines the interplay between the institutions and in particular the frequency and timing of consultations, with the strategies of organized interests who have mobilized to affect change. It illustrates how the ideas and content of the poverty reduction strategies policies adopted are shaped by these dynamics. She is also currently studying innovative strategies to tackle youth at risk of homelessness. This research focuses on cross-sectoral collaboration and community-based preventative interventions to foster more equitable educational opportunities and outcomes for youth at risk.

Rachel is part of numerous SSHRC-funded research teams. This has allowed her to work on varied topics such as the restructuring of social services in the field of mental health and addictions in Ontario and in Quebec; comparing provincial strategies to provide access to French-language services in minority contexts; the impact of charitable regulations on political advocacy; and the impact of social procurement policies on social enterprises. 

She is the author of Voluntary Sector Organizations and the State, UBC Press, which won the ANSER-ARES best book award in 2014. She is also the editor of Government-Nonprofit Relations in Times of Recession, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013 and The New Federal Policy Agenda and the Voluntary Sector: On the Cutting Edge, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. She is currently co-editor of The Oxford International Handbook of Public Administration for Social Policy: Promising Practices and Emerging Challenges - USA and CANADA section, 2023.

Rachel has held visiting appointments at the Centre for Nonprofit Management, School of Business, Trinity College Dublin, and the School of Criminology, Politics and Social Policy, University of Ulster.

Teaching

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

Service (2023/2024)

• Departmental Committee
• Graduate Committee
• Graduate Fellowship Committee (Chair)
• Renewal, Tenure and Promotions (RTP) Committee (Chair)

Research Interests

Italian politics; European politics; European Union; political economy; economic policy; interest groups; business; labour; trade unions; industrial relations; parties; elections; Marxism; political philosophy; philosophy and methodology of social science

Current research: The EU and Italian economic policy 

Brief Biography

Grant Amyot retired from the Department of Political Studies in 2022.

Born in Victoria, B.C., Grant Amyot wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Italian Communist Party, for which he undertook research in the field and at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. At Queen's, he teaches primarily on comparative politics, European politics, and the EU. He has also taught in political thought and the philosophy and methodology of social science, and has co-taught an Italian literature course.

Professor Amyot has served as co-editor of  Queen's Quarterly  and as a member of the editorial board and executive committee of Studies in Political Economy.

His primary research areas are Italian politics, European politics, and the European Union.  His interests include political parties and unions, but most recently he has written on political economy and economic policy, which are the subject of his latest monograph. His current research involves the impact of the EU on the Italian political system and Italian policy-making.

In his recent work, the principal theoretical framework has been provided by political economy and state theory, though he has also drawn on neo-institutional, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Even when focusing on Italian politics, he has striven to introduce the international and European dimensions into these approaches.

Research Interests

Queen's University Research Profile

Nationalism, the politics of ethnicity, challenges to democracy, minority democratic agency, Central and East European politics, the politics of European integration

Zsuzsa Csergő would be interested in supervising graduate students in the areas of: ​​​​nationalism, the politics of ethnicity, minority politics, Central and East European politics, issues of European integration.

Brief Biography

Zsuzsa Csergő (PhD in Political Science, The George Washington University, 2000) is The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Before joining the Queen’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Program in U.S. and International Politics at the George Washington University. From 2013-2020, she was President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), the largest international scholarly association in the field of nationalism and ethnicity studies. She currently serves as Director of the association’s online initiative, “Virtual ASN.”

Dr. Csergő's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies. Her articles about nationalism, majority-minority relations, kin-state politics, and minority democratic agency in the EU context have appeared in leading journals in her field, including Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Policy, Publius, Nations and Nationalism, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Societies, and other venues. She is the author of Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2007), co-editor and co-author of collaborative volumes (books and special issues) focused on Europeanization and minority political agency, and Central and East European politics. She is currently writing a book about the sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states, based on comparative research on six linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Poles in Lithuania, and Russophones in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).

Dr. Csergő leads the comparative Minority Institutions Database, which officially launched in March, 2023. She is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative research project entitled “The politics of complex diversity in contested cities” (funded by SSHRC), focused on Montreal, Brussels, Belfast, and Vilnius. Additionally, Csergő is a General Editor of the European Yearbook of Minority Issues, and a member of KINPOL: Observatory on Kin-State Policies, hosted at the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Csergő has received a number of prestigious awards and fellowships, including a Distinguished Alumni award from the George Washington University’s Department of Political Science in 2013, the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2006, the 2005 Sherman Emerging Scholar Award from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council, the George Hoffman Foundation, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. During the 2010-11 academic year, she was a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria. In May 2016, she was a guest scholar at the Institute for Minority Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. From 2019-2020, she served as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz.

From January-March 2023, Csergő was a visiting fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University (Washington, DC), and from May-July 2023 a visiting expert at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. From January-June 2024, she is a guest scholar at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria.

Teaching

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

Service (2023/2024)

• The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies
• Departmental Committee
• Workload Committee (Fall 2023)