Antoinette Handley
Office of the Dean, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street
Campus: St. George
Antoinette Handley joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science in 2003 and was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2008. She has also served as Chair and Graduate Chair of the Department of Political Science since 2017.
Professor Handley earned her undergraduate degree at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa and read for her MPhil in International Relations at Oxford University. She then earned her PhD in political science at Princeton University in 2003.
South African born, Professor Handley’s research interests regularly lead her back to the subcontinent for her research on state-business relations and the nature of Africa’s capitalist class.
Her first book on this subject, Business and the State in Africa: Economic Policymaking in the Neo-liberal Era, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her second book, Business and Social Crisis in Africa (CUP, 2020), considers how African economic elites respond to key moments of social and political crisis.
Professor Handley has begun work on two new projects. The first seeks to develop a political economy account of state formation in Africa; the second is an interdisciplinary collaboration on elite creativity and power on the continent. She has been the recipient of a number of scholarships and research grants including the Rhodes (1993), Fulbright (1998 — she served as the Amy Biehl Fulbright Fellow in that year), SSHRC (2007) and was the World Politics Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (2016–17).
Prior to entering academia, she served as the Latin America Research Fellow and then Director of Studies and Deputy National Director at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Professor Handley was appointed Vice-Dean, Graduate Education for a four-year term starting July 1, 2021.
- MESc, University Natal, South Africa
- MPhil, University of Oxford
- PhD, Princeton University
- African Politics: esp. Southern Africa
- Political Economy of Epidemics: HIV/AIDS
- Comparative Development
- Political Economy of Reform in Developing Countries
- Business-Government Relations
- Business as a political actor