Meet Thomas Marois, Professor for the Department of Political Science

On July 1st, the Faculty of Social Sciences welcomed a new cohort of faculty members, including Thomas Marois, who will join the Department of Political Science as a professor.

We caught up with Thomas to talk about his academic and professional journey, his main research interests, what excites him about this position, and what he does outside of work.

Tell us about your academic and professional journey so far.

An academic pathway was not one I ever expected to take. I grew up in Alberta in a working-class family and only started university as a mature student at the age of 25. A ‘politics for non-majors option’ at University of Alberta opened up my pandora’s box. I switched into an Honors Political Science degree and never looked back.

A number of subsequent opportunities shaped my trajectory: an undergraduate one-year exchange to METU, Ankara, Turkey; a Masters one-term exchange to ITESO, Guadalajara, Mexico; and Policy Advisor job for the Government of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife prior to starting my PhD at York University. In different ways, these experiences inspired me to know more about the world and grounded me in a practical emancipatory approach to political economy.

Then in 2009, I started a formative 14-year journey at SOAS University of London in the Department of Development Studies, focusing on the political economy of finance and development. My research led me from a critique of financialization to the exploration of financial alternatives. This is how I have now come to focus almost exclusively on the promise (and pitfalls) of public banks for green and just transitions around the world.

What excites you most about this position?

The support that the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Political Science have shown for my work on public banks. Both have really made extraordinary efforts to make McMaster my home and to help me make McMaster a future global hub of public banking research and policy advocacy. I am also so fortunate to be joining a Department with a strong political economy and progressive orientation. Scholars that I have read and drawn inspiration from for years will now be colleagues. Others are doing cutting-edge research that I look forward to learning about. What more could I ask for?

What are your main research interests?

The world of public banks. It is a massively understudied area — and one that may well be decisive in the transformations to come. Frankly, there is no pathway to green and just transitions that will not go through public financial institutions, including central banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and public banks. Public banks will be doing most of the heavy lifting. But for whose benefit? The public good or private interests? There is nothing inherently good or bad about public banks. As contested institutions there are a lot of politics and power relations at play. I’m mainly concerned with making public banks function better and in the public interest. It’s an urgent research agenda since so much of the space on public banks and finance has been ceded to neoclassical economists over the last four decades. A new generation of progressive scholars is needed to understand the promise and pitfalls of public banks.

Outside of academia, what do you like to do?

I pretend to want to learn how to play guitar. The instrument and stand look nice in the living room. Mostly, though, I love to spend time with my family. We are avid game players. We walk and hike a lot together. And we love to host friends for dinners and drinks. I used to canoe quite a lot in Alberta, and picking this up again is high on my list of things to do with my return to Canada.