I am a Lecturer in Government at the University of Essex and External Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim. Before coming to Essex, I was an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim (2017-2018), and a doctoral student, post-doc, and senior researcher at the European Politics group of ETH Zurich (2010-2016). I spent Fall 2015 as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.
My research focuses on the institutional design and legitimate governance of international institutions, both public and private.
In recent years, I have become increasingly interested in the transnational arenas and actors involved in managing the operation of the Internet at an infrastructural level. I am currently working on a project on participation and political conflict in internet governance arenas such as the Internet Engineering Task Force or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Ultimately, my goal is to understand the political role of these seemingly technical arenas, the range and effects of their regulatory activities, and the long-term viability and legitimacy of this way of organizing internet governance.
I also have a long-standing interest in mechanisms that can help the European Union and other international organizations work more democratically and deal successfully with heterogeneous preferences and identities of governments and citizens. Here, my projects focus in particular on understanding the potentials and limits of parliamentary oversight and legitimation, on one hand, and the costs and benefits of designing more flexible and differentiated international institutions to accommodate the capacities and demands of different countries and populations, on the other.
