Patti Tamara Lenard is Associate Professor of Applied Ethics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Ottawa, in Canada.  Lenard completed her DPhil in Political Science and International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford University in 2005, for work that focused on the role of trust in multicultural, democratic, political communities. 

Her publications include Trust, Democracy and Multicultural Challenges (Penn State University Press, 2012); several co-edited books, including Imperfect Democracies (UBC Press, 2012), co-edited with Richard Simeon, and Legislated Inequality: Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada (McGill-Queens UP, 2012), co-edited with Christine Straehle.  She has edited a recently published special issue of the Monist, titled “The Political Philosophy of Trust and Distrust in Democracies and Beyond” (2015).  Her articles have been published in Political Studies; Politics, Philosophy and Economics; Review of Politics; Ethics and International Affairs.  Her newest article titled “Denationalization and Citizenship” is forthcoming in American Political Science Review.

Her research focuses on the moral questions raised by migration across borders, as well as on multiculturalism, trust and social cohesion, and democratic theory more generally.   She is particularly interested in the normative and political challenges to all of these, posed by the importance of protecting them (in the name of “national security”) from terrorism.  Presently, she is working on three major projects, one of which focuses on the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of denationalization laws in democratic states, one which focuses on the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of sanctuary city policies, and one of which focuses on the moral merits and demerits of the private sponsorship of refugees.