About the Speaker

Ayelet Shachar (FRSC) is the R.F. Harney Chair and Director of Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is Professor of Law, Political Science and Global Affairs. Previously, she was a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Shachar has published extensively on citizenship theory, immigration law, cultural diversity and women’s rights, new border regimes and global inequality, as well as the marketization of citizenship. 

She is the author of several major books, including Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001)—winner of the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Award; The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2009), named International Ethics Notable Book in recognition of its “superior scholarship and contribution to the field of international ethics;” and, most recently, The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (Critical Powers Series, Manchester University Press, 2020)—shortlisted for the 2022 C.B. Macpherson Prize. She is the lead editor of the field-defining Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2017 & 2020). Shachar is an Honorary Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and has also been the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School and the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has provided pro-bono consultation to judges, non-governmental organizations, the European Parliamentary Research Services, and the World Bank. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a global citizen at heart, Shachar has received numerous research excellence awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.