I am a Professor of European and International Studies at  the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. I am also an Adjunct Professor in Political Science, Germanics, and in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UW.   My research takes two main directions. I explore the intersection of states and societies in national and transnational arenas with emphasis on public voice and advocacy in the European Union. And I am interested in the role of gender in politics with a specific focus on gendered political representation and women’s advocacy in Europe.   

After undergraduate and graduate studies in Freiburg, the Free University Berlin, and at the New School for Social Research in New York, I worked as a visiting researcher with critical theorist Leo Loewenthal at UC Berkeley and completed my Ph.D. at the Free University in Berlin/Germany. The resulting book titled The Political Public Sphere in the Modern State has been published in German by Nomos Press. It investigates the role of the modernizing state in forming the bourgeois public sphere in the 19th century.   

Following research and teaching appointments at the Universities of Leipzig and at the Free University Berlin, I came to the University of Washington in 2002 on a DAAD (German Academic Exchange) Professorship. Since 2011 I am a tenured faculty member at the Jackson School. I am a founding member of the women and politics section of the German Political Science Association and a founding editor of femina politica, the leading journal of women and politics in German-speaking countries. After the fall of the wall, I served for four years as Director of the Executive Office to the State Secretary of Labor and Women’s Affairs in the first united government in Berlin.