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Faculty Promotions
Professor Emeritus
Faculty of Arts and Science
Henry Habib
Henry Habib is an outstanding teacher, a highly respected scholar and a model academic citizen. He has held the rank of Full Professor of Political Science since 1975.
He was the founder of the Department of Political Science at Loyola College in 1961, and Chair of the Department during its formative years, 1961-1969. Subsequently, he was Chair of the Department at Concordia University from 1982 to 1998.
In all his years as chair, his relations with colleagues and students have been characterized by mutual respect and a concern for the welfare of the department and all its members. The remarkable longevity of his tenure as chair is indicative not only of the confidence of his colleagues and of our students – it also reflects the measure of his commitment to the department and the university.
Henry Habib was a recipient of the John W. O’Brien Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985. This was a tribute to his sustained outstanding performance as a classroom teacher and student advisor. His course evaluations since then show that he has remained a superb teacher, held in high esteem by his students.
He is also a highly respected scholar and authority on the politics of the Middle East, and has published two books, articles and book reviews. He is frequently invited to speak and comment on the politics of the Middle East. At present, he is Visiting Professor in Islamic Studies at McGill University.
During his career at Concordia, Dr. Habib served on many committees and academic bodies. He has been a member of the Board of Governors, almost continuously, since 1971. As a member of the Board, he has been asked to serve on many of its most important and sensitive committees. He is at present a Governor Emeritus of the Board.
Full Professor
Arts and Science
Charles Bertrand
Charles L. Bertrand joined the Sir George Williams University History Department in 1967. He quickly gained, and has retained, a reputation as an excellent and dedicated teacher at the undergraduate and graduate level. He is best known for his course The Age of the Dictators, Europe 1914-1945, which fills to capacity year after year. Dr. Bertrand proved his dedication to teaching when he taught three credits every year while serving in the University’s senior administration. He has supervised a number of Master’s theses, including one that won the McCullough Prize for best thesis of the year.
Dr. Bertrand served as Chair of the Department of History from 1981 to 1985. In that year, he became the first Dean of the unified Faculty of Arts and Science, and he remained as Dean until 1992. Under his leadership, the Faculty increased its budget, its number of full-time faculty members, its research funding and its commitment to teaching. In addition, Dr. Bertrand demonstrated that a single Dean could effectively represent the Faculty.
In 1992, he was appointed to the position of Vice-Rector, Services, which he held until 1997. As Vice-Rector, he oversaw the completion of the J.W. McConnell Building, the renovation of the PT Building, and the establishment of Concordia as a smoke-free institution. From June 1994 to August 1995, at the request of the Board of Governors, he served as Interim Rector and Vice-Chancellor during a critical time in Concordia’s history.
Dr. Bertrand, a specialist in modern Italian history, has published a number of articles in scholarly journals and chapters in books. He edited the volume Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917-1922 (1977), and has published more than 40 book reviews in publications such as the American Historical Review and the Canadian Journal of History.
William Bukowski
William M. Bukowski joined the Department of Psychology and the Centre for Research in Human Development, Concordia University, as Associate Professor in 1989.
He came to Concordia from the University of Maine, where he had held a faculty position in the Department of Psychology since receiving his PhD from Michigan State University in 1994. He was born in Buffalo, New York, and became a Canadian citizen in 1994.
His original work in the field of child development was recognized early by a Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development (1994-95) and by a Faculty Scholarship from the W.T. Grant Foundation (1988-1996).
Since coming to Concordia, Dr. Bukowski has played a major role in the Centre for Research in Human Development. He is known internationally for his seminal research in the importance of childhood and adolescent friendships and peer relations, for which he receives major funding from both Canadian and U.S. granting agencies.
He is author of numerous research papers and book chapters in the field, and recently edited with Newcomb and Hartup The Company They Keep: Friendship During Childhood and Adolescence, published by Cambridge University Press, 1996; he also serves as a consulting editor for the major journals in the field.
He has been a significant mentor to numerous successful graduate students and an important influence in all aspects of life in the University and the department. Dr. Bukowski served as Chair of the Department of Psychology from 1996 to 1999.
John Capobianco
John A. Capobianco obtained his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from McMaster University in 1973. He was recruited by Environment Canada (Inland Waters) and worked there for five years before acquiring a diploma in chemistry, then a doctorate from University of Geneva, Switzerland, which he received in 1984.
After a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University, he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Concordia under the provincial Action structurante program, after which he remained as a faculty member. He is now department chair.
Dr. Capobianco’s research has increased our knowledge base in the field of novel inorganic materials. The research is multifaceted, using a wide variety of experimental and theoretical tools to provide a thorough understanding of the dynamic, optical and physical properties of glasses and crystals. His investigations of the dilution-narrowed laser spectroscopy of optically interesting ions doped into glasses have allowed the characterization of the sites occupied by these ions.
Dr. Capobianco has received substantial grant and contract support, and as a result, his state-of-the-art lab has been the training ground for some outstanding graduate and undergraduate students; for example, Guy Cormier was the 1993 winner of the prestigious Prix d’excellence for his thesis work.
Dr. Capobianco has taught inorganic chemistry and spectroscopy at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has been on a variety of Faculty and University committees, and has been a visiting professor in France and Italy.
Christopher Gray
Christopher Berry Gray joined the Department of Philosophy at Loyola College in 1967, and has continued to teach at Concordia. He completed his degrees in philosophy (MA, PhD, the Catholic University of America, D.C.) in the early 1970s, and in law (BCL, LL.B, McGill University) in the late 1970s.
He specializes in the philosophy of law, but teaches social philosophy, the full cycle of history of philosophy courses, and basic program courses, as well as graduate courses and tutorials.
He is appreciated by students for his availability and his course design, and has directed a dozen theses and examined many more. He has taught leisure studies, business ethics, and the legal studies cluster, as well as helping to initiate the proposed Loyola International College.
Dr. Gray has published four books, including two on the French jurist Maurice Hauriou and another on the US. Constitution. His two-volume The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia will appear this summer.
He has contributed four dozen chapters and articles and dozens of reviews to domestic and foreign publications, and presented more than 100 conference studies, from philosophy of law, forensic psychology and history of philosophy to politics, architecture and theology. He has organized a dozen scholarly conferences in Montreal in this research, particularly for the Canadian and the American sections of the International Legal Philosophy Association, many of whose offices he has also held.
Dr. Gray chaired the Philosophy Department from 1987 to 1995, and has run its committees, as well as serving on Faculty and University committees and acting as an advocate before the University’s hearing boards. He has held executive office three times and council office often in the full-time faculty union.
He has run many projects for the promotion of marriage and family life, and for the Roman Catholic archdiocese, as well as various artistic, educational, sports, economic and political community services.
Harald Proppe
Harald Proppe obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1969 at McGill University and joined the Department of Mathematics of Sir George Williams University in 1970 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1975.
His publications include papers in differential geometry, probability, ergodic theory and dynamical systems, and his research interests also include mathematics education. He has taught a variety of courses from the introductory to the graduate level, and for many years has coached problem-solving teams for the prestigious William L. Putnam Mathematics Competition. He is particularly proud of the successful Actuarial Mathematics program, which he initiated in the early 1980s.
Over the years, Dr. Proppe has been department chair and director of two graduate programs, as well as director of the department’s co-operative education program. He has served as an elected representative on a large number of University bodies, including Faculty Councils, Senate and the Board of Governors. He was active in the Concordia University Faculty Association shortly after it won official certification, and served as chair of the negotiating committee during the later stages of negotiation and arbitration that resulted in the first collective agreement. He also served as co-chair of the Faculty and Staff Division of the first Capital Campaign and of the 1998-99 Concordia Centraide campaign.
In 1987, he was seconded to the administration on a full-time basis as Associate Vice-Rector, Institutional Relations and Finance. In 1994, he was appointed Interim Vice-Rector, Institutional Relations and Finance, at a particularly turbulent time in the University’s history. This was also the period during which there were massive reductions in government funding to universities.
During his years as an administrator, Dr. Proppe continued to work with graduate students and publish research papers. When he returned to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in 1997, he began teaching in the Actuarial Mathematics program. He is also currently working with colleagues to develop a program in the mathematics of finance.
Harvey Shulman
Harvey Shulman was an undergraduate at Sir George Williams University and did his graduate work at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has been a full-time faculty member since 1971.
He has had a remarkable teaching career, both in the Department of Political Science and at Liberal Arts College.
Harvey Shulman is an inspiring teacher in part because he is unusually well read, not only in the literature of political thought, but more broadly in the history of Western civilization. His publications and scholarship are on the Bible and the manner in which it was read by early modern political thinkers, such as Spinoza and Hobbes, and contemporary scholars, such as Daniel Elazar and Emil Fackenheim.
Professor Shulman was the first Vice-Principal of the Liberal Arts College, 1978-1984, and its second principal, from 1985 to 1991. He is currently a Permanent Fellow of the College. His colleagues celebrate his dedication, selflessness and sheer hard work in making the College the great success it has become. He remains a committed and active teacher and participant in the Political Science Department, where he also pursues his teaching and research interests in American politics, American political thought, and academic freedom and civil rights.
Professor Shulman has made a major contribution to University governance and the Concordia University Faculty Association (CUFA). He has served on a number of major committees and on University Councils. He was a member of Senate in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. He was previously Vice-President of CUFA and co-chief of the team that negotiated the most recent collective agreement.
T.N. Srivastava
T.N. Srivastava obtained his Bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics and statistics in 1957, and his Master’s degree in applied mathematics with a specialization in relativity and quantum mechanics in 1959 from Lucknow University (India). He then joined the department of mathematics at the University of Gorakhpur (India) and worked as a research scholar, then as a lecturer in mathematics.
He joined Loyola Degree College in 963, and became actively involved in research. He worked on differential geometry of the Kawaguchi Manifold and has collaborated with colleagues in Canada, the U.S. and Japan. He received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Gorakhpur (India) in 1969.
In 1973, he changed his field from mathematics to statistics, and received his PhD in statistics from the University of Sheffield (U.K.) in 1991. He has worked in other areas as well, such as integral transforms and econometrics, and has regularly published papers in refereed journals. He has been a referee for mathematical reviews for 16 years (1976-1992).
Dr. Srivastava has served Concordia University for 36 years, holding the rank of Associate Professor for 30 years. He has taught a variety of courses in mathematics and engineering mathematics at the undergraduate level, and in statistics at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His teaching has consistently been rated highly by his students.
He has served as an examiner for many Master’s and PhD theses, and has been a member of the departmental personnel committee for 35 years, and an academic advisor for undergraduate students for the last 13 years; he has also been responsible for coordinating the Math Help Centre. He has chaired sessions at international conferences, and served four times as a member of the search committee for the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
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