Robert Vipond appointed Interim Director of CSUS

A Message from Stephen J. Toope, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Rob Vipond as Interim Director, Centre for the Study of the United States for a six-month term, effective July 1, 2016.

Professor Vipond has been associated with American Studies at the University of Toronto for almost thirty-five years. He was a member of the American Studies Committee, then academic director of the American Studies program in the 1980s. As the program developed and ambitions for American Studies grew in the 1990s, he helped create the Centre for the Study of the United States and served as its founding Director (1999-2003).

No stranger to academic administration, Professor Vipond has also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1997-2006, and more recently (2009-2012) was the Director of the collaborative PhD program in the Dynamics of Global Change at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Professor Vipond has written widely in the areas of American and Canadian constitutionalism and political development. He is currently co-organizing a series of SSHRC-funded workshops on American, British, and Canadian political development. A new book, Making a Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity, will be published by the University of Toronto Press early in 2017.

I am deeply grateful to Rob for agreeing to take on this interim role and I know that you will join me in welcoming him back to the Munk School’s leadership team in this capacity.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Peter Loewen for his outstanding leadership of the Centre for the Study of the United States for the past three years. We will have an opportunity to celebrate Peter’s contributions shortly.

I will be convening a committee in the early Fall to search for a Director of Centre for the Study of the United States to take the helm as of January 2017.