Welcome Avia Pasternak!
We are thrilled to announce that Avia Pasternak will join us as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UTSC, on January 1, 2023.
Professor Pasternak is a political philosopher, whose work has centred on the political obligations and responsibilities of citizens, qua members of their state. She has pursued three core issues: the duties of citizens – in both democratic and in non-democratic states – to share in the costs of their state’s wrongdoings; the duties that fall to citizens who benefit from the wrongdoings of others; and the permissibility of violent protests in response to state injustices. Professor Pasternak has published in the most distinguished journals in moral and political philosophy, and has a 2021 book with Oxford University Press, Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings? She currently has a book under contract with OUP, on violent protests.
Professor Pasternak will be a central figure in UTSC's planned undergraduate program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. She has over a decade of experience researching and teaching in this interdisciplinary field. She has taken a leadership role in university education: most relevantly, she recently served as the Director of Education in the Political Science Department at University College London (UCL), a position that includes, among other things, inter-departmental collaboration on program design; and she played a leading role in her department’s meeting its commitment to diversify its curriculum, having designed and led a Teaching Away Day on decolonizing the curriculum, which led to the introduction of new modules in her department.
Let's show Professor Pasternak a great welcome.