Dr. Colin Bennett

Colin Bennett received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor and Chair of the Department. From 1999-2000, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2007 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley.

His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has published three books: Regulating Privacy: Data Protection and Public Policy in Europe and the United States (Cornell University Press, 1992); Visions of Privacy: Policy Choices for the Digital Age (University of Toronto Press, 1999, with Rebecca Grant); The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in the Digital Age (The MIT Press, 2006 with Charles Raab). He has completed policy reports on privacy protection for the Canadian government, the Canadian Standards Association, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the European Commission, and the UK Information Commissioner. He is currently completing projects on the subject of “privacy advocacy” in Western societies, as well as on the politics of identity cards. He is currently the co-investigator of a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting.”

He teaches a range of courses on US politics, political analysis and information and communications policy.