Daniel Béland
Professor
School of Public Policy
University of Saskatchewan

[full CV - PDF]

Daniel Béland is a Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan. Holding a PhD in Political Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), he has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and The University of Chicago, and a Fulbright Scholar at The George Washington University and the National Academy of Social Insurance. From July 2001 to December 2007, Professor Béland taught sociology at the University of Calgary.

A political sociologist analyzing politics and public policy from a comparative and historical perspective, he has published four books and more than three dozen articles in major scholarly journals. With John Myles and Brian Gran, respectively, he also co-edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology devoted to social policy reform in contemporary societies, as well as a forthcoming volume on the relationship between public and private social benefits (Palgrave). In August 2008, Oxford University Press will publish his fifth book, which is titled Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity. Co-authored with André Lecours from Concordia University, this book stems from his first SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) Standard Research Grant (2003-2007).

In April 2008, SSHRC awarded him a second Standard Research Grant to collaborate further with Professor Lecours. Their new interdisciplinary project is Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Fiscal Redistribution and Territorial Politics in Four Federal Systems. This project focuses on the politics equalization policy in Australia, Canada, Spain and Switzerland.

Additionally, Professor Béland is currently working on a number of new book projects. The first one is entitled Reshaping American Social Policy? and it explores the role of ideas in contemporary American social policy. The co-author of this book is Alex Waddan from the University of Leicester. His other book projects include an edited volume on ideas and politics in social science research (in collaboration with Robert H. Cox from the University of Oklahoma), and an essay on the nature of social policy, which is under contract with Polity Press.

Professor Béland currently serves as the Editor (French) of the Canadian Journal of Sociology and as member of the editorial board of the Canadian Review of Social Policy. He is also the Secretary-Treasurer of the Research Committee 19 (Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy) of the International Sociological Association. Finally, since 2004, he has been a committee member of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme (Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences). Professor Béland is a co-investigator in the SEDAP (Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population) multi-disciplinary research program funded primarily by SSHRC and centered at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada).