junior fellows
Brian Adeba
Brian Adeba is Deputy Director of Policy at the Enough Project in Washington, DC where he focuses on issues pertaining to the political economy of conflict in South Sudan. Previously a journalist, Brian supervised the coverage of conflict in Sudan’s regions of Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile for the Nairobi-based Sudan Radio Service managed by the Education Development Center in Boston. Brian also covered parliamentary committees on defence and public safety for a newspaper in Ottawa. He worked as a project and publications coordinator for The Centre for International Governance Innovation, a think-tank in Waterloo, ON. Brian's peer-reviewed research on South Sudan and Sudan has been published in The Rusi Journal (Taylor & Francis), the Centre for Security Governance in Kitchener, ONand the Canadian Journal of Media Studies. Brian is currently a PhD student in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, where his research focuses on the use of force in United Nations peacekeeping.
Meredith Denning
Meredith Denning is a diplomatic and environmental historian. She completed her PhD in history at Georgetown University in 2018. She also holds an MA in History from Georgetown University and an Hon. B.A. in International Relations from the University of Toronto.
Her work is interdisciplinary and transnational. Hers was the first dissertation committee at Georgetown’s History Department to include an environmental scientist. As a pre-doctoral fellow with the Mellon Sawyer Anthropocene Seminar, she brought scholars of the environmental humanities, social sciences and physical sciences into conversation through symposia, conferences and public events.
Dr. Denning’s current book project focuses on the links between environmental change, human perception and changing transboundary institutions in the Great Lakes watershed. Forthcoming publications include a chapter in an edited volume from University of Calgary Press, The First Century of the International Joint Commission
Jonathan Kent
Jonathan Kent is a research fellow with the World Refugee Council. His research examines the intersections of refugee, asylum and migration governance, the state of asylum among Western liberal democracies, technology and migration, and the climate change and forced migration nexus. Jonathan was a former Cadieux Léger Fellow with Global Affairs Canada and a junior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. His research has appeared in International Studies Review, Geopolitics, and International Migration. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto.
Daniel Manulak
Daniel’s research focuses on twentieth-century international and global history, with an emphasis on Canada’s relationship with Southern Africa. More broadly, his work explores how race, emotion, and international order have shaped global cooperation. In August 2021, Daniel completed his SSHRC-funded PhD in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. He is working on a book manuscript entitled A Light in the Window: Canada, Race, and South African Apartheid. Daniel’s research has been published in International Journal, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and the Canadian Historical Review (in press).
Ari Barbalat
Ari Barbalat is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at UCLA. His thesis studies cross-regionalism in world politics, supervised by Professors Steven Spiegel and Richard Anderson. He holds a Master's in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Chicago (2008) and an Hon. B.A. in International Relations and History from University of Toronto, Trinity College (2006). Ari also specializes in Jewish thought and ethics pertaining to international relations, Israeli foreign policy in comparative perspective, international relations theory and the interplay of religion, literature and human rights. He is a native of Thornhill.
Sean Fear
Sean is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds, and a Visiting Professor at Fulbright University Vietnam for the 2022-23 academic year. He completed his doctorate at Cornell University and has held fellowships and New York University, Dartmouth College and McGill University. His interests include Vietnamese history, Southeast Asia, United States foreign relations and the Global Cold War, and he is working on a book under contract with Harvard University Press which examines the breakdown in political legitimacy in South Vietnam during the final stages of the Vietnam War.
Susan Khazaeli
Dr. Susan Khazaeli is a defence scientist with Defence Research and Development Canada. Embedded with the Strategic Joint Staff at National Defence, she provides direct decision–making support to senior Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) leadership through evidence–based research. As a defence and international security expert, her research spans across a wide range of topics. Her current work focuses on adversarial behaviour, hybrid threats to Canada and allied partners, and often focuses on the Middle East. She is also involved on NATO activities. At present, she is the Canadian lead on a NATO System Analysis and Studies panel on strategic culture and deterrence.
Her work has been published in various journals, including most recently, the International Journal.
Tina Park
Tina Park received her PhD from the History Department, University of Toronto, working on Korean-Canadian relations from the 1880s to the 1980s, under the supervision of Profs. Robert Bothwell, Margaret MacMillan, and Andre Schmid. She is also a co-founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (CCR2P), and co-founded, with Dr. Carolyn Bennett, the Women in House program.
Jennifer Levin Bonder
Jennifer is a SSHRC funded doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Under the supervision of Robert Bothwell, she is researching the origins, functioning, and legacy of the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA). A policy experiment during Pierre Trudeau’s time in office, FIRA was created to screen the foreign acquisition of Canadian firms and establishment of new business enterprises in Canada. She is interested in the nature of economic nationalism in Canada; the effects of foreign capital on Canadian society, politics, and development; and how Canada can learn from the policy experiments of the past.
Jennifer sits on the Graduate History Society as the representative to the Canadian Historical Association and is an associate editor with the Department’s peer reviewed journal, Past Tense: Graduate Review of History. She is a Teaching Assistant for the third year course, “Canadian International Relations.” Jennifer is a Junior Fellow at both Massey College and The Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.
Isaac Friesen
Isaac Friesen is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His postdoctoral research at Cambridge explores politics, history and the state from below by documenting how Arab migrants in Egypt and France have experienced repression, conflict and human rights violations and advocacy in their home states. Isaac received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2021. His dissertation examines ways provincial Egyptians have navigated and crossed socioreligious borders since 1967. Prior to his position at Cambridge, Isaac was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and has ongoing research on religion, migration and politics in Canada. More broadly, Isaac is a specialist in geopolitics, human rights, global history, and the anthropology of the contemporary Middle East, where he has lived and conducted research for over four years.
Meredith Kravitz
Meredith Kravitz is a Junior Fellow at The Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. She is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Toronto, focusing on resource competition, energy geopolitics, international security, and foreign policy. She also currently works as a researcher for the Arctic Security Program at the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.
In 2010, Meredith graduated from Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs with a Master of Arts in International Relations, where she obtained a Graduate Certificate of Specialization in International Security Studies. She also holds a Master of Arts in English: Issues in Modern Culture from University College London, and a Bachelor of Arts in Honours English Literature from Concordia University.
Matthew S. Wiseman – Visitor
Matthew S. Wiseman is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He attained a PhD in History from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2017 before holding successive post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto (2017-19), Western University (2019-20), and St. Jerome’s University (2020-22). His research on the history of science and technology in Canada has appeared in books and scholarly journals, and he is the author of a forthcoming monograph on the history of science in northern Canada and the Canadian Arctic during the early Cold War. As a Junior Fellow of the Bill Graham Centre, Dr. Wiseman helped launch Canada Declassified, an open-access repository of government records released under Canada’s Access to Information Act, in 2018 and continues to conduct and support several historical research projects on various aspects of Canadian international history in the post-1945 period.
Maria X. Chen – Visitor
Dr. Maria X. Chen is a historian of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on European culture and identity. Maria completed her PhD in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is also a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. Her doctoral research focused on contemporary European integration and its effect on identities. She used the case study of the European Community’s wine policies and its impact on French wine producers to examine broader issues about the integration process, changes in local and regional identity, relationships between different levels of government, and food culture. Maria holds a B.A. from the University of Alberta and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. Maria’s research interests are in Western European Integration History, post-1945 Europe, the cultural Cold War, issues of nationalism and identity, food and wine history, and jazz history.
Ozren Jungic – Visitor
Ozren Jungic grew up in Vancouver, BC, and attended Simon Fraser University where he studied Business Administration and History. He completed his Master's at St Antony's College, Oxford, and his PhD at Magdalen College, Oxford. Oz has worked as an analyst and speechwriter at the prosecutor's office of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia , as well as for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His research interests include modern conflict and international intervention, political transition, and ideology.
Michael Lumbers – Visitor
Michael Lumbers is a Visiting Fellow at The Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. He obtained his PhD in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His dissertation, which examined U.S. policy toward China during the administration of Lyndon Johnson, was published as Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge Building to China During the Johnson Years by Manchester University Press. A specialist in U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, presidential decision making, Sino-American diplomatic history and contemporary strategic relations, and East-Asian security, his various articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The National Interest, Diplomatic History, Journal of Cold War Studies, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and other publications.