Olga Talal

I am a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity at Queen's University. I am interested in nationalism and ethnicity, minority rights, and public policy toward minorities. My research integrates comparative nationalism studies and public administration approaches focusing on institutions, parliamentary politics, bureaucratic politics, and policy-making. My research has been published in Comparative Political Studies,and I have a forthcoming article in Politics & Policy.

Currently, I am working with Professor Zsuzsa Csergo on the Minority Wellbeing Index. We explore how ethnic minorities develop and sustain democratic agency under conditions of structural inequality in majoritarian states. The project focuses on minorities in several Eastern and Central European states: Russian speakers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poles in Lithuania, and Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia.