Lavinia Stan emigrated to Canada from Romania shortly after the Revolution of December 1989, which ousted the communist regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. A graduate of the University of Toronto (PhD in Political Science), Stan has been working on democratization, broadly defined. More exactly, she has published extensively on religion and politics (mostly with her husband, Concordia University Theology professor Lucian Turcescu) and transitional justice (the way in which post-dictatorial countries reckon with their recent human rights abuses by adopting lustration, property restitution, access to secret archives, rehabilitation, and compensation or by launching court trials and memorialization projects). The author, co-author, and editor of volumes published with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, and Dartmouth, Stan is former chair of the Wildavsky Prize Committee of the Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, member of the editorial boars of eleven scholarly reviews in North America and Europe, and current Regional Editor for Europe of the internationally acclaimed peer-reviewed Women's Studies International Forum.