Reflections from CSPC Fellows 2026

In March of 2026, we had the privilege of travelling to Washington D.C. on behalf of the Munk School at the University of Toronto as part of the Presidential Fellows programme at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC). As International Fellows, we met with fellows from across the United States and Mexico to hear from distinguished academics and politicians on pertinent issues facing the United States. We had the privilege to meet and learn from figures such as Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV), State Senator John Damoose (R-MI), and Ambassador John D. Negroponte. Under the banner of America’s 250th anniversary, we explored constitutional crises and outlooks for America’s next 250 years, within both the domestic and foreign spheres.

Daria's reflection:

I am grateful to the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice for the opportunity to participate in the CSPC fellowship program. It has been a truly formative experience, which has furthered my research skills and allowed me to develop a much deeper understanding of American domestic and foreign politics by travelling to Washington, D.C. and engaging with it firsthand.

I titled my research paper Leveraging Ukraine’s Wartime Defense-Technology Ecosystem to Strengthen U.S. Strategic Superiority in Drones, Electronic Warfare, and Digital Military Systems. Throughout the fellowship, I developed my primary research skills by conducting interviews with members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, defense technology entrepreneurs, NATO defense officials, and defense analysts from Ukraine and the United States. I have also received extensive support from my mentor Joshua Huminski, Senior Vice President of National Security & Intelligence Programs at CSPC.

I am honored to share that the paper was selected among fifty fellows to win the Robert A. Kilmarx Award for Best Military, Intelligence, and National Security Strategic Analysis. This award is very valuable to me. I took on this project to show just how many valuable lessons Ukraine’s technological defence sector offers for American and broader NATO defence and security. I view this research prize as a validation of that argument - a recognition that Ukraine’s experience holds real strategic value and should be capitalized on by the country’s Western allies. 

William's reflection:

The CSPC Presidential fellowship was a truly extraordinary experience that furthered my understanding of American politics domestically and abroad by listening to a wide range of highly-qualified experts and practitioners in the field. I am deeply grateful to the Peace, Conflict, and Justice program and the Dr. Scholl Foundation for making this fellowship experience and research possible.

My research paper, titled “The Impact of Executive Orders on Presidential Legislative Success from Clinton to Trump,” explored the unconventional relationship between executive orders and congressional floor votes via a mixed-methods study that incorporated OLS regressions and qualitative speech analysis. With the supervision of Dr. Matthew Dull, associate professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, my findings illustrated that the decision by the president to proceed or withhold from using executive orders is an inherently legislative process, forcing us to rethink the purpose of the executive order as a tool in the president’s policymaking toolkit. 

I am honoured to have been awarded the David M. Abshire Award for Most Outstanding Paper by an International Fellow for my paper. Where politics is seemingly more divisive and the three branches of U.S. government consolidated, further work must be done to illuminate how