Oliver Schmidtke is the director for the Center for Global Studies and Professor in the Departments of History and Political Science. He holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Studies. Dr. Schmidtke is the former Director of the European Studies Program (2005-2008) and President of the ECSA-C (European Community Studies Association-Canada 2004-2006).
Oliver received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. After teaching at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany he was a J.F. Kennedy fellow at Harvard University, a F. Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute and a Marie Curie Fellow at Hamburg University. From 1999-2002 he was the DAAD lecturer in European and German Studies at the University of Victoria. His research interests are in the field of European politics, contemporary European history, and comparative politics with a focus on migration from a comparative transatlantic perspective.
Martin Bunton is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Victoria and serves as an Advisor to the Europe Canada Network (EUCAnet). His research and teaching focus on European imperialism, the colonial state, land and property regimes, and the historical foundations of political community, with a particular emphasis on the modern Middle East. He holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and an MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His scholarship examines colonial administration and land legislation in comparative perspective, including case studies from mandate-era Palestine and Egypt. His recent books include A History of the Modern Middle East (7th ed.) and The Contemporary Middle East: Foreign Intervention and Authoritarian Governance Since 1979. In his advisory role, he contributes a historically grounded and comparative perspective to EUCAnet’s work on empire, governance, and global political order.
Beate Schmidtke
Co-Lead & Manager of the EUCAnet projects: CEDoM/CEDoD/MSEUCA/ECSA-Cn and the Jean Monnet Network European Memory Politics), University of Victoria
Beate Schmidtke brought to the EUCAnet project experience of several projects that she managed with the funds of the European Commission (yearly up to 1.5 million Euros) focusing on implementation of the New Media in the field of culture and education in close collaboration with the Council of Europe and European wide networks (Germany, Italy, Poland, Netherlands).
Professional Experience
Since 2004 she concentrates on developing networking and outreach strategies in the field of European Studies in Canada. Past projects developed and managed are the Young Researchers Network in Canada (2005-2007) , the DAAD German Studies network (2005-2008), and the EUCAnet outreach branch for the Canada Europe Transatlantic Dialogue Strategic Knowledge Cluster (2008-2016).
Fazila Mat
Communications & Media Officer
PhD Student, Dept. of Political Science
Fazıla Mat is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Victoria in the faculty of Political Science under the supervision of Dr. Oliver Schmidtke. Fazıla holds an MA degree in Humanities from the University of Milan and she has worked for 12 years as a journalist and commentator for Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT) and other Italian and Swiss media covering Turkish politics, EU-Turkey relations, migration, civil society and media issues. For OBCT she has also carried out research on the EU-Turkey refugee deal (2017), media freedom in Turkey (2014 and 2018) and academic freedom in Turkey (2018). Her research interests include populism, migration and EU-Turkey relations.
Karen Yen
Design Advisor
Karen Yen is a freelance graphic designer with 20 years of experience that started in San Francisco, continuing on in New York and Barcelona, and now in Victoria.
She has had the experience of working on a variety of projects, ranging from nationwide retailers to small businesses, academic research and alternative projects. She has created logos, stationery, printed material as well packaging and websites. Karen has a BA in Communications from Simon Fraser University in Canada and a BFA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, US. She is also a practicing artist whose medium of expression is painting and drawing.