Nadine Fabbi was first appointed assistant director of the Canadian Studies Center in 1999. Under her leadership, and thanks to the effective cultivating of relations with a diverse and global network of colleagues, the Center has grown from a modest unit little known outside of the Jackson School of International Studies into a Center with an international reputation.
Nadine has spearheaded dozens of projects that have put the Center on the map including building one of the first Arctic minors in the contiguous states, creating the nation’s first Fulbright Canada Visiting Chair in Arctic Studies, offering the first fellowships for the study of the Inuit and Nuu-chah-nulth languages, founding the Task Force on the Arctic (an undergraduate capstone course for the Jackson School), as well as running programs to support graduate student research, and an exchange program with University of Victoria and The University of British Columbia.
Since joining the Jackson School, Nadine has co-written seven U.S. Department of Education Title VI grants totaling over $11 million to support Center programming and graduate fellowships for the study of French or Indigenous languages. She has brought in an additional $2 million from prestigious grantors including the governments of Canada and Québec, the Korean Maritime Institute, the Carnegie Foundation of New York, the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and private donors.
Her research interests include how we understand the Arctic as a unique region in the field of area studies and international studies and what this means in higher education; how Arctic Indigenous internationalism is influencing international relations and regimes such as the Arctic Council; and how policy and spatial activism in Arctic foreign and domestic policies are reshaping how we think about international relations and social justice.
Recent publications include a book chapter, “Inuit Nunangat: The development of a common Inuit territorial and policy space in Canada” co-authored with Gary Wilson in The Inuit World (2021) and Indigenous Well-Being in Arctic Canada (and Beyond), a special edition of the American Review of Canadian Studies edited with Patricia Johnston named Best Special Journal Issue in 2023 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, an international organization of scholarly journals.