York University Professor Emeritus Stephen Hellman passed away on Aug. 19.
Hellman joined the Department of Political Science (as it was then known) as a lecturer in 1971, before being promoted to assistant professor two years later, then going on to become a full-time professor. He retired in 2014.
Hellman taught a wide variety of courses in the department, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and was the anchor for the department’s comparative politics field. He was responsible for guiding countless PhD students through the field’s rigorous core course and qualifying exam process. He was the graduate program director for a term, the perennial comparative politics field representative and a willing volunteer for countless ad hoc committees.
As an academic, Hellman’s research focused on post-war Italian politics but extended to western European politics more generally left political parties and labour movements. He was the author of Italian Communism in Transition: The Rise and Fall of the Historic Compromise in Turin, 1975-1980, a co-editor and contributor to six editions of the bestselling textbook European Politics in Transition, and he produced more than 30 book chapters and journal articles over the course of his academic career.