Wendy H. Wong

Wendy Wong has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto since 2008. She was a CIFAR Junior Fellow in the Successful Societies program from 2010 to 2011.   Wendy completed her PhD in Political Science in 2008 at the University of California at San Diego, under the supervision of David Lake.  She also holds a B.A. with Distinction from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. from UC San Diego.  In 2008, she began her current position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. 

Wendy is interested in the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational networks in securing changes in international norms.  She is currently completing a manuscript entitled More than Morals in which she examines how the organizational structure of seven international human rights groups – Amnesty International, the Anti-Slavery Society, Human Rights Watch, the International League for Human Rights, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam International, and the Red Cross network – has profound consequences for their influence over how we understand and use human rights.  Wendy plans to pursue a related undertaking during her Junior Fellowship at CIFAR by flipping the question of how norms change internationally to how those norms get taken up domestically.  She is developing a project that focuses on the translation of international human rights norms by domestic NGOs to make subjects such as women’s rights and the freedom of religion more palatable in different types of contexts.  In particular, she is interested in the effects of regime type and the presence of civil conflict on how NGOs take international standards and disseminate them in their respective communities.  Preliminarily, she has considered investigating NGOs in India, Hong Kong, and Israel.