Congratulations to Jacques Bertrand who has been awarded the Dr. David Chu Professorship (Chair) in Asia-Pacific Studies. The appointment recognizes excellence and dedicated leadership to research and the study of the Asia-Pacific region. A Professor of Political Science, Jacques Bertrand had led and taught several generations of students as Director of the Masters’ collaborative specialization in East and Southeast Asian Studies. He has also supervised more than a dozen doctoral dissertations on the Asia-Pacific region. He was the founding director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute. He is also the co-founder of the Postcor Lab at the University of Toronto, a research hub for the study of civil wars and war-to-peace transitions, where much of his focus is on civil wars in Southeast Asia.
Most recently, he received the 2024 Dean’s Research Excellence Award from the Faculty of Arts and Science, which recognizes significant and sustained research achievement and impact. He has worked for many years on issues of ethnic conflict, nationalism, secessionism, and civil war in Southeast Asia. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the United States Institute of Peace, as well as the International Development Research Centre. His books include Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge, 2004); Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance (Cambridge, 2010); Political Change in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2013); Democratization and Ethnic Minorities: Conflict or Compromise? (Routledge, 2014); Democracy and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2021); Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (w/ Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier, Cornell UP, July 2022) and State and Sub-state Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2024).
As the Dr. David Chu Professor, Professor Bertrand will continue to pursue excellence in his scholarship on the region, contribute to strengthening undergraduate and graduate education in Asia-Pacific Studies, and provide dedicated and dynamic leadership in support of scholarly activities on the region.