Catherine Lu, professor of Political Science, has been selected as the recipient of a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award is valued at €45,000. Lu is only the second McGillian to win the prestigious award for outstanding accomplishments in research to date and exceptional promise for the future. The previous winner was James McGill Professor Jonathan Kimmelman, in the Biomedical Ethics Unit and Social Studies of Medicine (2014).
On top of her other duties at McGill, Lu is Coordinator of the Research Group on Global Justice of the Yan P. Lin Centre. Her research and teaching interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of humanitarianism and intervention in world politics; theories and practices of justice and reconciliation; colonialism and structural injustice; and cosmopolitanism, global justice and the world state
The Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award is granted to some 20 scholars and scientists annually who are “internationally renowned in their field… and who in future are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements which will have a seminal influence on their discipline beyond their immediate field of work.” Lu intends to visit her nominator, Prof. Stefan Gosepath, Director of the Institute for Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, in the spring of 2019 and the summer of 2020. She plans to elaborate further on ideas developed from her award-winning book, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (2017), and investigate how dominant conceptions and practices of self-determination should be transformed to contribute to the task of decolonizing contemporary domestic and international orders.