Department of Political Science
The Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto ranks among the world’s best. It provides an ideal setting for students and learners at all levels to engage with novel ideas, thorough scholarship and creative research in all of the discipline’s subfields, as well as in an array of interdisciplinary areas of inquiry. As a community of established and emerging scholars–teachers and students–we are uniquely positioned to draw upon a Canadian perspective as well as the university’s intellectual buzz and the city’s cultural diversity, to address the most enduring questions of politics, locally and internationally.
More than ever, our mission is to encourage our students to think broadly, critically, and internationally about the core features of democratic and global citizenship. We do this with a faculty that includes award-wining teachers, building on a legacy of famously gifted instructors — the likes of Harold Innis and C.B. Macpherson, Alan Bloom, Tom Pangle, and Janice Stein. With a history going back to the 1880s, the department now has a total faculty complement of over sixty across the three campuses of the University of Toronto. We offer numerous courses at all levels and in a variety of fields: political philosophy and theory, Canadian politics, international relations and world affairs, comparative politics of industrial and developing societies, and public policy in Canada and abroad. Each year we admit over 30 new students to our Ph.D. program – the largest and most prestigious in Canada. At any point in time, we have about 150 students pursuing doctoral studies in our Department most of whom receive generous funding during their first five years in the program. Many dissertations written by our doctoral students have been awarded prizes and later turned into influential books. All three nominees for the 2009 CPSA’s Vincent Lemieux Dissertation Prize, to pick just one example, are recent graduates of our Ph.D. program.
Numerous other graduates of our Ph.D. program have gone on to pursue successful academic careers in universities throughout Canada and the United States, as well as in many other countries worldwide. In addition, we offer a popular MA program, which admits approximately 60 new students every year. On the St. George campus alone, over 400 undergraduate students are enrolled in our Specialist programs, over 800 in our Major program each year, and approximately 750 in our Minor program. Thousands more, from programs all over the university, take our courses. Taken together, the programs at the other two campuses — University of Toronto at Mississauga and University of Toronto at Scarborough are about three-quarters of the size of the St. George programs.
Our faculty are among the best in the world, featuring a unique blend of towering intellectuals alongside up and coming bright minds. Each year, our faculty members are invited to deliver public lectures in the world’s foremost universities — from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton to Oxford and Cambridge. Members of our department produce on average ten (10) books a year, with the world’s best presses. Our faculty is closely engaged with on the ground, research and development projects in Canada and abroad, from the Arctic to the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the post-Communist world. Political Science faculty members are routinely honoured for their accomplishments. Eleven have been named to the , the most prestigious academic appointment in Canada; three have won Governor-General’s awards — the most prestigious book award in Canada; eight have received major teaching awards; five have been named to the Order of Canada — the highest civil honor in the country; five hold Canada Research Chair appointments, and have been recognized as international leaders in their respective fields, from comparative law and courts to public policy in Asia. In addition, over the last decade alone, books published by our faculty members have won over half a dozen awards for the best work in their respective fields.For more information on admission, faculty, courses, news, and more, visit their website here.