Lavinia Stan (born 1966 in Pitești, Romania) is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. She currently lives in Montreal. Education and career After obtaining a degree from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, she emigrated to Canada in 1991. She then earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Between 2001 and 2003 she taught at Dalhousie University in Halifax, while from 2006 to 2008 she taught at Concordia University in Montreal. Since 2004, Stan has been a Professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier university in Nova Scotia. Stan served as Vice-President and then President of the Society for Romanian Studies, the premier international organization on Romanian Studies, in 2010-2014 and 2014-2019, respectively, in which capacity she launched two key publication venues in the field of Romanian Studies: a book series sponsored jointly by the SRS and the largest academic publisher in Romania, Polirom, and the peer-reviewed Journal of Romanian Studies. Stan was also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile in Bucharest (2010-2012), and a member of the editorial or advisory boards of some twenty scholarly journals published in North America and Europe, including Human Rights Review. She has been a member of the Club of Rome since 2009, and Associate Editor of peer-reviewed Women's Studies International Forum and East European Politics and Societies. Stan has been an expert witness in a number of cases on deportation and asylum, as well as property restitution and corruption, in American and British courts. Publications Lavinia Stan's publications have dealt with three major themes: transitional justice, religion and politics, and democratization broadly conceived, with a focus on post-communist Eastern Europe. She is renowned for her work on religion and politics in post-communist Romania, which argues that the majority Orthodox Church must be reigned in, if democracy is to be consolidated. Her work on transitional justice in post-communist countries has also gained wide recognition for her attention to the way in which civil society actors, even "political entrepreneurs" working in isolation from others, can advance reckoning in countries where state actors are unwilling to do so. Stan is one of the foremost scholars in Romanian Studies, having helped consolidate the field internationally. She has authored, co-authored or edited the following volumes: Transitional Justice Transitional Justice and the Former