Nomi Claire Lazar

Professor Nomi Claire Lazar (@NomiClaireLazar) is an expert in emergency powers and apocalyptic politics. She is a Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

She is the author of States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge, 2009/13), a key work on the subject, and the highly acclaimed Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale, 2019) which shows how leaders make use of time to legitimize power at moments of crisis.

She was a member of the research council for the Rouleau Commission on the use of the Emergencies Act by the Canadian government during truck convoys, protests and border blockades in Canada Feb. 14-23, 2022.

At the University of Ottawa, Professor Lazar teaches courses on human rights, political ethics, political rhetoric, and criminal law policy. She has also taught at the University of Chicago and Yale, and served as Associate Dean of Faculty at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. She writes about crises from a number of angles: emergency powers, constitutions, political legitimacy, rhetoric, temporality, conspiracy theories, and apocalyptic and utopian politics.

She serves as an elected member of the University of Ottawa’s Board of Governors and is an active member of civil society. She advocates for prisoners’ rights and is a frequent contributor of commentaries to news outlets and blogs in North America and Asia.

Professor Lazar holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University and an MA from University College London’s School of Public Policy.