CCGES is pleased to announce that Roger Keil has been appointed Centre Director for 2009-10 academic year. Keil’s experience as a long-time resident affiliate of CCGES recommends him for this appointment as does a resumé which includes periods of study and teaching at Canadian, American and German universities.

A professor in York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, Keil received his PhD in Political Science from Frankfurt’s Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, where he also studied German and American Studies.

Keil’s research interests are many and include urban governance, global cities, infectious disease and cities, urban infrastructures and urban political ecology. Currently he is collaborating on Comparing Metropolitan Governance in Transatlantic Perspective, a SSHRC-funded project comparing policy, politics and governance in Toronto, Montréal, Frankfurt/M. and Paris. In addition, Keil is the co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and a co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA).

Included in his impressive list of publications are Los Angeles: Urbanization, Globalization and Social Struggles (Chichester: John Wiley, 1998); Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles (with Gene Desfor) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, Nature and Society Series, 2004); (ed. with N.Brenner) The Global Cities Reader (London und New York: Routledge, 2006); ed. with S.H.Ali, Networked Disease: Emerging Infections and the Global City. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); ed. with J.A.Boudreau and D.Young, Changing Toronto: Governing the Neoliberal City (Toronto: UTP 2009); ed. with Rianne Mahon, Leviathan Undone? The Political Economy of Scale. (Vancouver: UBC Press 2009).

“I’m looking forward to working together with the Centre’s faculty affiliates and our partners, both off campus and here at York, to build a stronger CCGES,” says Keil. “The Centre has an important role to play in connecting Canada and Europe, and I think our research agenda can make a significant contribution to increasing understanding and knowledge in a number of areas of importance – on both sides of the Atlantic.”