Leah Madelaine Schmidt (MPhil, BA Hons., BA Dist.) is a 2025 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow, Student Fellow at the Leverhulm Centre for Future Intelligence, and Doctoral Researcher in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies under the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her work spans policy and academia, with a focus on affect, security imaginaries, feminist/crip/queer political theory, and the lived consequences of geopolitical insecurity.

 

Originally from Canada, Leah is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and a Fellow with the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network. She serves as a Gender Rising Expert with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and is a former Gender Lead for Canada’s G7/G20 diplomatic team. Named to the 2024 Canada-France Future Leaders in Defence  cohort, she is also a Senior Advisor on Human Rights for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, Government of Canada, and has previously worked with Amnesty International, the U.S. Department of State, and Calgary Queer

Arts Society. In her spare time, she serves on the Board of Directors for Young

Diplomats of Canada and National  Model United Nations-Canada, and is a

dedicated mother to her two perfect cats.

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Doctoral Research

Leah’s PhD research junctures critical theory, gender theory, and critical security

studies to explore how anxiety acts as a recursive affective force in contemporary

security governance. She is currently tracing how Cold War epistemologies,

particularly those born in the atomic age, continue to shape narratives of

existential risk, disinformation, and identity politics in today’s geopolitical

imaginaries. Drawing on affect theory, biopolitics, and quantum security logics, her

dissertation investigates sites such as Cold War civil defense culture, the aesthetics

of the bunker, AI “doomerism,” and prepper subcultures to theorize anxiety not as a

private pathology but as a somatic-political mode of governance.

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Research Philosophy

Grounded in a background of critical discourse analysis, Leah's

research philosophy champions creative interdisciplinarity, bringing

together political theory, security studies, cultural analysis, and

affect studies, while remaining grounded in the foundational

knowledge of political science and international relations theory.

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Leah values collaboration across disciplines and works to

bridge innovative critical approaches with

established traditions of political inquiry, ensuring her

scholarship speaks both to forward-looking theoretical

debates and to classic questions in the field.

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Statement of Praxis

As a teacher and mentor, Leah is committed to a

feminist praxis that emphasizes accessibility, dialogue,

and critical curiosity. She creates inclusive and rigorous

spaces that encourage students to question inherited

assumptions, while also engaging with the canonical

foundations of political science to build confidence and

fluency across traditions.​