Jane Jenson

Jane Jenson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance. She earned her B.A. Honours from McGill and her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and then taught at Carleton University from 1971 to 1993. She has been a Visiting Professor at a number of European universities, including the Universität Augsburg, Freie Universität Berlin, and the European University Institute in Florence. Dr. Jenson held the William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair in Canadian Studies at Harvard University in 1988-89 and in spring 2005 the Chaire Bernheim d’études sur la Paix et la citoyenneté at the Université libre de Bruxelles. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1989 and named a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation (2005-08). 

Dr. Jenson is Editor of Lien social et Politiques, a social policy journal. Between 1999 and 2004, she was the Director of the Family Network of Canadian Policy Research Networks, Inc., a policy think tank located in Ottawa.

Her current research interests and publications cover a wide spectrum of topics, including: citizenship and especially social citizenship, social policy, social movements, diversity, and gender studies.  She is particularly active in the analysis of changes to social policy paradigms in the direction of the social investment perspective in Canada and the European Union.  She is frequently consulted on these matters by governments, NGOs and research groups in Quebec, Canada and the European Union.

She publishes frequently in scholarly journals in English and French in Canada and abroad and has written numerous policy research reports.  Many of the latter can be consulted on www.cprn.org (Opens in a new window) while the former are available at www.cccg.umontreal.ca (Opens in a new window).