Nomi Claire Lazar is Full Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where she teaches human rights, moral reasoning, and criminal law policy.
An Ottawa native and uOttawa Professor since 2009, Lazar has served as Director of the Program in Conflict Studies and Human Rights and recently returned from a leave of absence in Singapore where, as Associate Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College, she had the opportunity to lead the development and consolidation of its global curriculum.
Lazar has also taught at Yale and the University of Chicago. With an interdisciplinary training in political science (PhD Yale 2005), legal theory (MA UCL SPP 1999) and philosophy (HonBA Toronto 1998), Prof. Lazar’s scholarship explores political ethics, crisis government, comparative constitutionalism, and political legitimacy. She is currently at work on a book about apocalyptic politics, and has published two previous monographs: States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge, 2009/13) and Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale, 2019).
Prof. Lazar is also actively involved in civil society, particularly prisoners’ rights advocacy, and is a regular commentator for publications including the Toronto Star, Channel NewsAsia, the Singapore Straits Times, and Maclean’s. Before her PhD (Yale, 2005) she worked for Justice Canada on the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and as a regulatory policy consultant with A.T. Kearney. Passionately committed to the democratic process, Prof. Lazar has also served as Supervising Deputy Returning Officer for Elections Ontario.