Ray Taras

Born and educated in Québec, Raymond Taras received his BA from l'Université de Montréal before completing PhDs at the universities of Essex in England and Warsaw in Poland. He began publishing scholarly books in the 1980s and has authored or edited over twenty books. These include a major book on the collapse of the USSR; Russia's identity in international relations; the rise of liberal and illiberal nationalisms; the internationalization of ethnic conflict; the threats of xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe; an interdisciplinary critique of multiculturalism; the impact of fear on foreign policy making; and a reimagined understanding of nationhood. In 2023 Ray published a study of Thucydides' meditations on fear applying it to six contemporary case studies implicating great world powers. He also edited a ten-chapter book on Russia's exceptionalism in international politics, modeled on how the United States first made the claim to being an exceptional power. He served on faculty at universities in North America including Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Vermont, Colorado, and Tulane; and in Europe encompassing the European University Institute in Florence, Malmö, Sussex, Aalborg, and Coventry. In 2018-19 he received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. His interests are world literature, world cinema, and winter sports.