She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, for which she was awarded a Vanier Scholarship and a fellowship from the Baxter & Alma Ricard foundation. She has been a postdoctoral fellow of the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal and a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests focus on the relationship between courts and minorities in democratic systems, and particularly the Supreme Court of Canada's impact on the evolution of official-language rights and Aboriginal self-determination rights. She is also interested in territorial and non-territorial autonomy arrangements for linguistic minorities in the world. Dr. Chouinard has published in Ethnopolitics, the Language Rights Review, Language Minorities and Society, and the International Journal of Canadian Studies, among others.