Zsuzsa Csergő

Research Interests

Queen's University Research Profile

Nationalism, the politics of ethnicity, challenges to democracy, minority democratic agency, Central and East European politics, the politics of European integration

Zsuzsa Csergő would be interested in supervising graduate students in the areas of: ​​​​nationalism, the politics of ethnicity, minority politics, Central and East European politics, issues of European integration.

Brief Biography

Zsuzsa Csergő (PhD in Political Science, The George Washington University, 2000) is The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Before joining the Queen’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Women’s Leadership Program in U.S. and International Politics at the George Washington University. From 2013-2020, she was President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), the largest international scholarly association in the field of nationalism and ethnicity studies. She currently serves as Director of the association’s online initiative, “Virtual ASN.”

Dr. Csergő's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies. Her articles about nationalism, majority-minority relations, kin-state politics, and minority democratic agency in the EU context have appeared in leading journals in her field, including Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Policy, Publius, Nations and Nationalism, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Societies, and other venues. She is the author of Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2007), co-editor and co-author of collaborative volumes (books and special issues) focused on Europeanization and minority political agency, and Central and East European politics. She is currently writing a book about the sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states, based on comparative research on six linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe (Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Poles in Lithuania, and Russophones in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania).

Dr. Csergő leads the comparative Minority Institutions Database, which officially launched in March, 2023. She is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative research project entitled “The politics of complex diversity in contested cities” (funded by SSHRC), focused on Montreal, Brussels, Belfast, and Vilnius. Additionally, Csergő is a General Editor of the European Yearbook of Minority Issues, and a member of KINPOL: Observatory on Kin-State Policies, hosted at the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Csergő has received a number of prestigious awards and fellowships, including a Distinguished Alumni award from the George Washington University’s Department of Political Science in 2013, the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2006, the 2005 Sherman Emerging Scholar Award from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council, the George Hoffman Foundation, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. During the 2010-11 academic year, she was a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria. In May 2016, she was a guest scholar at the Institute for Minority Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. From 2019-2020, she served as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz.

From January-March 2023, Csergő was a visiting fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University (Washington, DC), and from May-July 2023 a visiting expert at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. From January-June 2024, she is a guest scholar at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria.

Teaching

For detailed information about political studies courses and instructors, please refer to the Undergraduate and Graduate pages. 

Service (2024/2025)

• The Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies
• Appointments Committee
• Departmental Committee
• Field Convenor (Comparative)
• Renewal, Tenure & Promotion (RTP) Committee