Eric Van Rythoven receives Contract Instructor Teaching Award
The Department of Political Science congratulates Eric Van Rythoven on receiving a Contract Instructor Teaching Award 2025. Eric is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Political Science.
Eric engages students by showing them global politics in unconventional places. Whether examining why diplomats swear on social media, why NATO soldiers engage in the ritual of sharing military rations or what EDM music can tell us about the struggle to recognize Indigenous rights, Eric challenges students to think about global politics in unconventional ways.
“My research examines the intersection between emotion, International Relations, and the politics of security. I am principally interested in what political emotions are, how they shape debates about security, and how they become sites of contestation in global politics. By drawing on diverse sources of data — including Parliamentary exchanges, committee hearings, journalistic reports, polling data, interviews, political cartoons, and beyond — I reconstruct collective emotional experiences in ways that highlight constraints and opportunities for claim-making in security discourse.
My work has been published in International Theory, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Global Security Studies, Critical Studies on Security, as well as the European Review of International Studies. I am also the co-editor (with Mira Sucharov) of Methodology and Emotion in International Relations (Routledge, 2019).
I teach a range of courses including Introduction to International Relations, Canadian Foreign Policy, the Globalization of Human Rights, Advanced International Relations Theory, Emotion and Images in International Politics, and Frontiers of Emotional Diplomacy.”