We are thrilled to announce that on January 1, 2023, Avia Pasternak will join us as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at UTSC and in the Graduate Department of Philosophy on the St. George campus.
Professor Pasternak is a political philosopher whose work has centred on the political obligations and responsibilities of citizens qua members of their state. She has pursued three core issues: the duties of citizens – both in democratic and in non-democratic states – to share in the costs of their state’s wrongdoings; the duties that fall to citizens who benefit from the wrongdoings of others; and the permissibility of violent protests in response to state injustices. Professor Pasternak has published in the most distinguished journals in moral and political philosophy, and has a 2021 book with Oxford University Press (OUP), Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings? She currently has another book under contract with OUP, on violent protests.
Professor Pasternak will be a central figure in UTSC’s planned undergraduate program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, an interdisciplinary field in which she has more than a decade of experience researching and teaching. She has also taken on leadership roles in university education: most relevantly, she recently served as the director of education in the Political Science Department at University College London (UCL), a position that includes, among other things, inter-departmental collaboration on program design. She also played a leading role in her department’s meeting its commitment to diversify its curriculum, having designed and led a Teaching Away Day on decolonizing the curriculum, which led to the introduction of new modules in her department.
Let’s show Professor Pasternak a great welcome.
