Research Group on Constitutional Studies

09/06/2026

Research being presented today, Sunday, September 6, by RGCS students and alumni at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston.

8 am:
Emma Ebowe (BA '18, now Assistant Professor of Government and Africana Studies, William & Mary) and coauthors, “Gerrymandering and Geographic Polarization Have
Reduced Electoral Competition”
Marriott Nantucket

Ming Kit Wong (visiting graduate student 2024), “Utopian Hope, Literature, and Politics in Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty”
Hynes 102

09/05/2026

Research being presented today, Saturday, September 5, by RGCS students and alumni at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston

8 am:
Daniel Lukac (PhD4), “Partisan Deference as an Associative Duty”
and
Shal Marriott (MA '24, PhD4), “The Diminished Female Voice in Democratic Deliberation”
Hynes 301

10 am
Natalie Pennisi (BA '24, PhD4), “Does Sympathy Enlighten? On Sympathy, Solidarity, and Injustice“
Hynes 103

10 am
Mary Jo MacDonald (BA '27, now Assistant Professor of Political Science at Mount Allison University), “The Female Slave Narrative: Captivity, Concubinage, and Chattel”
Hynes 102

12 pm
Agatha Anna Slupek (BA '15, now Assistant Professor of Political Science, Western Michigan University), “Understanding Reactionary Women with Simone de Beauvoir”
Hynes 103

2 pm
Alec Crisman (PhD '25), “The Political Comprehensive Collapse: Limits and Strategies for Civic Education”
Hynes 110

2 pm
Abbie LeBlanc (MA '21, now PhD student at Harvard), “What's Wrong with Owning the Moon?”
and
Isaac Stethem (BA '13, MA '16), “Spatial Politics and Planetary Systems: Claiming More to Exclude Less”
Hynes 102

09/04/2026

Papers today, Friday September 4, by RGCS students, postdocs, and alums at APSA:

8 am
Samantha Puzzi (PhD5), “Deliberative Demarcation: The Democratic
Potential of Barricades and Blockades”
Hynes 200

Alexis Bibeau-Gagnon (postdoc), ”Disrupting Political Time: Coercion in Climate Contestation”
Hynes 309

4 pm
Thu Nguyen (MA3), “The God and the Prophet: Making Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh Sacred”
poster session, Hynes Hall A

Solomon Schafer (MA '26, now PhD student at Toronto), “Ideas with Lives of Their Own: Ideology, Critique, and Conspiracy Theory”
Westin Empire Room

Martha Pitre (MA '24 PhD4), “Waking Sleeping Beauty: Reading Walter Benjamin for Child Liberation”
and
Emma Ebowe (BA '18, now Assistant Professor of Government and Africana Studies, William & Mary) , “What’s in a Name? Epistemic Silencing in the Foster System”
Hynes 306

09/03/2026

8 am
Florence Manlapas (MA3), “The Sexual Regime: Queerness and Group Identity”
Westin, Defender Room

12 pm
Kyuree Kim (PhD8), "Theorizing Structural Processes in Structural Injustice and Domination"
Virtual Panel Room 6

2 pm
Wenyang Gao (MA '19, PhD student at Brown), “Justice as a Virtue and Ecological Citizenship”
Hynes Convention Center 309

3 pm
Thu Nguyen, (MA3) “’Digging Its Own Grave’: Colonial Disruptions in Cambodia and Vietnam”
Poster session, Hynes Convention Center Hall A

09/01/2026

Yesterday RGCS PhD student Lucas Jerusalimiec (Political Science) successfully defended his dissertation:

"Kings, clerks, and counsellors: bureaucratic identity formation and state development in Early Modern France."

Chair: Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli.
Supervisory committee: Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli, Elissa Berwick, Christian Nadeau.
Examining committee: Víctor Muñiz-Fraticelli, Elissa Berwick, Yves Winter, Jacob Levy, and Catherine Power (York University; RGCS MA 2012).

Why did early modern state development in France fail to produce public policy instruments commensurate with the size and wealth of the French State? Why did high levels of organization in warfare, bureaucracy, and taxation not result in increases to the state’s capacity to regulate and extract value from domestic economic activity? This project suggests that intra-bureaucratic factors such as the prospects of career progression, the means of achieving security of tenure, the source of within group social cohesion, and the level of institutionalized policy direction were highly determinative of mid-and senior-level public servants’ willingness to advance coherent policy positions against political resistance. The project triangulates secondary historical research, public policy theory, and contemporary policy analysis to establish the strength of each of these factors in the central French administration at the end of the sixteenth century. I take the work of Jean Bodin as my primary case study due to his status as an educated, connected, but ultimately uninfluential observer of central government institutions who achieved notoriety by intervening in a sixteenth-century debate on constitutional legitimacy with a comparative treatise on public administration. Bodin is relevant today as a source of public administration theory as applied to monolithic and depersonalized monarchical governments while he is relevant to the case of French state development as the most coherent articulation of the road not taken. Bodin’s own identification of the sources of French state weakness serves as important corroborating evidence to modern historical research. But the silence with which Bodin’s audience of public servants treated his efforts forces us to look for the idiosyncratic structural factors that caused the bulk of the professional public service to fade gradually from relevance during the Bourbon period. I conclude that, while early modern state development in France provided a crucial impetus for the development of modern political science and public administration theory, it was conditioned and constrained by factors that resisted political pressure. The clarity of Bodin’s analysis of public service stagnation reveals that these constraining factors were partly endogenous to the government, as public servants could not have failed to understand his diagnosis of immediate and concrete problems. This dissertation supports this finding with an analysis of the socio-economic motives that shaped public servants’ behaviour in office. My research thus suggests that ideological and policy cohesion within bureaucratic corps may be just as important in enabling the growth of state capacity as rulers’ access to resources or to the principles of public policy theory.

Dr. Jerusalimiec's defense was then celebrated in the Shklar Room.

09/01/2026

RGCS APSA 2026 schedule!

https://www.mcgill.ca/rgcs/files/rgcs/rgcs_apsa_2026.pdf

08/28/2026

New book review by RGCS postdoc Alexis Bibeau-Gagnon, of _Property disobedience as protest: rethinking political nonviolence_ by William E. Scheuerman, in Contemporary Political Theory

Home Contemporary Political Theory Article Property disobedience as protest: rethinking political nonviolenceWilliam E. Scheuerman, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026. 232pp Review Published: 11 August 2026 Volume 25, article number 57 (2026) Cite this article Download PDF Save art...

08/27/2026

New from former RGCS visiting graduate student Ming Kit Wong, in Contemporary Political Theory: a book review of Matthew Cole, _Fear the future: dystopia and political imagination in the twentieth century_.

Home Contemporary Political Theory Article Fear the future: dystopia and political imagination in the twentieth centuryMatthew Benjamin Cole, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2025, xi+291pp., ISBN: 978-0-472-05774-0 Review Published: 20 August 2026 Volume 25, article number 64 (2026) Cite th...

08/18/2026

The application deadline for the 2026-27 RGCS Charles Taylor Student Fellowship is tomorrow, Wednesday, August 19, 5 pm.

CFA 2026-27 RGCS Charles Taylor Student Fellowship McGill's Research Group on Constitutional Studies brings together the study of political theory, political and legal philosophy, constitutional and public law, and empirical political science about constitutional institutions (the judiciary, federal...

08/17/2026

Our partners across town are on the move! The U de M philosophy department and the Centre for Research in Ethics have long been housed in the "Stone Castle" on Edouard-Montpetit. It provided a home base for the political philosophy and theory community in Montreal long before Ferrier was a glimmer in anyone's eye. The Department and the Centre are now moving into a more central location at U de M's campus, but let's acknowledge and thank the Stone Castle for its long service and for many memories there!