William D. Coleman

William D. Coleman holds the Center for International Governance Chair in Globalization and Public Policy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He was the Founding Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Born in Nelson, British Columbia, he received his B.A. from Carleton University and his M.A. and Ph.D from The University of Chicago.

He has written five books: The Independence Movement in Quebec, 1945 1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), Business and Politics: A Study in Collective Action (Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, 1988), (with Michael M. Atkinson) The State, Business and Industrial Change in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). This book was awarded the Charles H. Levine Prize for the best book in the fields of public administration and public policy by the Structure of Government Research Committee of the International Political Science Association. The two most recent books are Financial Services, Globalization and Domestic Policy Change: A Comparison of North America and the European Union (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) and Agriculture in the New Global Economy (with Wyn Grant and Timothy Josling) (Edward Elgar: 2004). He has also edited three books in the public policy field. He is the Project Director of the Globalization and Autonomy Series of books that is being published by the University of British Columbia Press. The first two books in this series, Global Ordering: Institutions and Autonomy in a Changing World, edited by Louis W. Pauly and William D. Coleman and Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts, edited by Diana Brydon and William D. Coleman were published in May 2008. The second two were published in 2009: Empires and Autonomy: Moments in the History of Globalization edited with Stephen Streeter and John Weaver and Unsettled Legitimacy: Power and Authority in a Global Era edited with Steven Bernstein. In addition to these books, he has written articles dealing with Quebec politics, business government relations, changes in agricultural policy, the making of financial services policy and globalization that have been published in journals in Canada, the United States and Europe.

In 1996, he received the Konrad Adenauer Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Bonn, Germany, awarded annually to a scholar in the humanities and social sciences in Canada. He used this award to pursue further research on agricultural policy in Germany and in the European Union. In January 2002, he was awarded a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives grant of 2.5 million dollars (CDN) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Together with 40 colleagues from across Canada and another 43 from outside Canada, he studied the relationships between “Globalization and Autonomy.” He was named a Fellow/Lauréat by the Fondation Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in May 2007.

He is a 1994 winner of a Canada-wide 3M Teaching Fellow awarded by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. In 1997, he was awarded an Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Teaching Award. McMaster University awarded him the President’s Award for Educational Leadership in 2002.