UVic a launching pad for peripatetic political scientist

Political scientist Assem Dandashly’s time at UVic took him across continents. Dandashly, who will return to UVic to convocate in June, is currently doing post-doctoral work at the Kolleg-Forschergruppe, Free University of Berlin. He says that UVic offered him the opportunity to travel during his PhD, sharing knowledge between North American and European institutions and deepening his research. It also afforded him a supervisor who has become a friend.

The Lebanon native has been an international traveller for most of his adult life, moving from Lebanon to the US, Canada and Europe in pursuit of the academic career he always aspired to. He credits his upbringing in the war-torn country for creating his interest in political science.
“Being raised in such an environment and having all the political activities going on, you get interested in the political situation, and in public administration,” he says.

ut Dandashly initially planned to do automotive engineering, and he still fixes cars and electronics as a hobby. He says that his interest in political science as a career evolved slowly during his undergraduate work. After he graduated with a BA in political science and public administration, a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship took him to the US for his graduate studies.

When he was beginning his PhD at the University of Oklahoma, however, supervisor Mitchell Smith told him to make the jump to UVic to work with the Department of Political Science’s Amy Verdun, renowned specialist on the euro. Dandashly was interested in focusing on “the transition that Poland and other countries in Central Europe took towards joining the EU,” with a focus on the euro currency.

“Mitchell told me it will be a loss for the department but it’s good for your career [to work with Verdun],” Dandashly says.

But “I’d never heard of Victoria before,” he says. Did he want to move even farther away from his family in Lebanon and leave the new home he’d made in the US? In the end, he took the plunge, and although it took a year for him to be certain it was the right decision, today he’s glad he did.

“After a year, given all the opportunities I got during my PhD and especially because of Amy, I said it was a very, very good decision,” says Dandashly. “I got to do a lot of travelling, a lot of field work, a lot of exchange with European institutions, and all this was with the support of Amy.”
Dandashly, who speaks English, French, Arabic, “some German” and “some Polish,” did research and work in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, England and Toronto during his five-year stint as a UVic PhD student. He defended the final product of his research, his PhD dissertation, at UVic in January.

“I think my committee enjoyed the defence,” he says. “Because I knew my stuff, I was confident, I wasn’t pressured. We had a really nice discussion, so it went really well.”

But the PhD is only a step in his career, says Dandashly, who hopes to return to Canada more permanently and find a tenure-track university faculty position.

"It’s a long-term career that, as one research project finishes, you’re already in the process or have started new research. It’s just one step in a long, long, long ladder,” he says.