Speaker’s Biography
Dr. Oliver Schmidtke
Professor and Director, Centre for Global Studies
Political Science, University of Victoria

Oliver Schmidtke is a Professor and UVic European Studies Scholar in the Departments of History and Political Science. Since 2006 he holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European History and Politics. From 2005 to 2008 he was the Director of the European Studies Program at UVic and from 2004 to 2006 he served as the President of the European Community Studies Association Canada. Since 2012 he has been the Director of the Centre for Global Studies and during the academic year 2016-17 he serves as the Acting Vice President Research.

He received his PhD from the European University institute in Florence, worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin in the late 1990s and spent a year as a research fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University before coming to UVic in 1999.

Over the past ten years Oliver Schmidtke has been a fellow at the University of Bonn (2005), the European University Institute (as a Fernand Braudel Research Fellow, 2007) and at the University of Hamburg (as a Marie Curie Research Fellow, 2011-12). In 2016 Oliver Schmidtke received the Faculty of Social Sciences Research Excellence Award

His research interests are in the fields of comparative European politics and contemporary history, European integration, the political sociology of immigration and ethnic conflict, and the role of identities and collective memory in modern societies.