Tenure: September 2022 to April 2023
Dr. Alasdair Roberts, BA, JD, MPP, PhD is a professor and former director at the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he focuses on problems of governance, law, and public policy. Author of many books and articles, Dr. Roberts received the 2021 Best Book Award (Section on Public Administration Research) from the American Society for Public Administration for his recent book, Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century (Cornell University Press).
Dr. Roberts is also the author of Can Government Do Anything Right? (Polity Books, 2018), Four Crises of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2017), The End of Protest: How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent, (Cornell University Press, 2013), America's First Great Depression (Cornell University Press, 2012), The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (Oxford University Press, 2010), The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government (New York University Press, 2008), and Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received four academic book awards. Dr. Roberts' next book, Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century, will be published in December 2022.
A Canadian citizen, Dr. Roberts taught at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University from 1990 to 2001. He has also served on the faculty of several American universities. Dr. Roberts was the inaugural director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017 to 2022, and co-editor of the journal Governance from 2009 to 2017. In 2007, he became the first non-American to be elected as a fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration. He received the ASPA Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in Comparative Administration in 2022, and the Grace-Pépin Access to Information Award in 2014.
Dr. Roberts has a PhD in public policy and a master's of public policy from Harvard University, a JD from the University of Toronto, and a BA from Queen's University.
In September 2022, Dr. Roberts will join the Canada School of Public Service as a visiting scholar through the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Initiative. In this role, he will support the School in encouraging greater awareness toward issues related to public sector management, public administration and the role and functions of government.
Related links
