started in Weimar, Thuringia, in the shadows of the short-lived 1919 Weimar Republic constitution and the stark division of East and West Germany;
continued with higher education in West Germany, notably at the Leibniz-Kolleg at the University of Tübingen, the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Studien in Bielefeld, the Universities of Munich (Political Science) and Hamburg (Modern Chinese). Having explored post-Franco Spain as a field researcher and freelance journalist, from Madrid and Barcelona across the new regional national autonomous communities, I earned a PhD in social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence.
As a lecturer, researcher and professor of comparative political sociology and European integration I worked at the universities of Barcelona (UAB), Heidelberg, Mannheim, Koblenz-Landau, Cornell University/Ithaca and Bremen/BiGSSS, promoted the EU’s Higher Education Exchange Program at Changchun University in China, and lectured in European Studies MA Programs at the University of Celaya in Mexico, and working with RGGU and PFUR in Moscow, and the Centre for European Studies in Manipal, India.
Taking roots in Germany’s smallest city state, in Hansestadt Bremen, I founded and chaired the Jean Monnet Centre for European Studies (CEuS, 2001–2016), contributed to the establishment of the interdisciplinary BA program “Integrated European Studies” at Bremen University, and helped establish the BremerEuropaZentrum, aimed at bringing EU politics and policies closer to the fellow-citizens.
The international financial and Euro-crisis inspired me to author the booklet “Europa erneuern” (“Renew Europe”), offering a democratic vision for the EU in the 21st century, and moreover a platform for running as a B90/Grüne candidate in the 2019 European parliamentary elections
My experiences as an official observer of the “Conference on the Future of Europe” (2021–2022), the most fascinating democratic innovation on a transnational scale to date, brought me back to Florence, to join the “Democratic Odyssey” project at the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance (since 2022, ongoing). Aimed at the conception, design and implementation of a Peoples’ Assembly for Europe, the Democratic Odyssey pilot has kicked-off in Athens (Sep 2024) and travelling to Florence (Feb 2025) and Vienna (May 2025). This journey is part of a larger research project funded by the EU’s Horizon Program (12/2024 – 2028) that aims at a grounded theory of scaling democratic innovations (ScaleDem). Facing an unruly 21st century democracy’s odyssey will have to embrace innovative models of transnational politics, a civic culture of dialogue and mutual understanding that pave the way towards a sustainable euro-demoicracy.
