Teaching & Advising

Current Teaching 

Information about my current teaching can be found here.

Information for students

Information about writing your MA thesis at the Chair for International Relations and Political Economy can be found here.

Information for contacting me for a letter of reference can be found here.

Teaching Philosophy

My goal as a teacher is to enable students to understand what they are learning, to  evaluate it and  to apply what they have learned to the real world. In the classroom, I therefore see my role in explaining and critically evaluating core theoretical or methodological concepts and in emphasizing their real world implications. One of the most important things I want to teach my students is critical thinking. I want them to critically evaluate what they are learning: Is the theoretical argument logically consistent? Is the empirical evidence convincing? Was the appropriate methodology used? Can you think of alternative explanation that might yield the same results? By asking these questions, I hope that students learn to develop their own opinion, as well as to make convincing arguments. In addition, my goal is to be fair and approachable. I make the rules of my courses and my evaluation criteria very clear from the beginning and give students feedback on why they received a certain grade and what they could do in the future to improve their performance. Finally, I try to create an atmosphere of mutual respect in my courses and to make them very interactive. This includes giving students serious and comprehensible answers to their questions and teaching students to give constructive feedback and to respectfully express their disagreement with someone else’s ideas. Students are encouraged to actively participate in discussions and other class activities.

Teaching:

International Relations

• Lecture International Politics
• Challenges to International Cooperation
• Understanding the Anti-Globalization Backlash
• Advanced Introduction to International Relations
• Specialization IR: The bilateral relations between Switzerland and the EU
• Specialization IR: European Monetary Policy
• Specialization IR: Globalization

Political Economy

• Lecture Political Economy
• Theories of justice and distributive conflict in capitalist democracies
• Lecture International Political Economy
• Risk and Politics
• The Politics of International Money & Finance
• Globalization and states’ capacity to act
• Theoretical and Empirical Research on Economic Voting
• Selected Topics in International Political Economy
• Special Topics in IPE
• Causes and Consequences of Globalization

Research Methods

• Research Methods in Political Science II
• Research Design
• Advanced Political Science Methods II: Advanced Regression
• Research Designs in Political Science
• Statistics Refresher

Advising & Mentoring

Current Post-Docs

Tuuli-Anna Huikuri

Tom Hunter

Giorgio Malet

Johannes Scherzinger

Former doctoral students

Ruth Beckmann, graduated 2016 (Uni Heidelberg)

"Don't Steal My Steel. How Interest Group Systems Impact Iron and Steel Policies"

Wolfgang Dietz, graduated 2015 (Uni Heidelberg)

"International Institutions in an Uncertain Environment. Success and Failure of Regime Formation in the Context of Complex Policy Issues."

Tobias Rommel, graduated 2018 (UZH)

"Foreign Direct Investment and the Politics of Autocratic Survival"

Nils Redeker, graduated 2019 (UZH)

"The Politics of Too Much: Essays on the Emergence and Persistence of Current Account Surpluses"

Tabea Palmtag, graduated 2020 (UZH)

"The Political Economy of Protest. How the Uneven Distribution of Development and Globalization Gains affects Welfare and Protest"

Ari Ray, graduated 2020 (UZH)

"The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Adjustment in the Eurozone Periphery"

Former post-docs in my group:

Dr. Loriana Crasnic

Prof. Dr. Irene Menendez Gonzalez (IE University, Madrid)

Dr. Raphael Reinke,

Silvia Decadri, PhD

Prof. Dr. Valentin Lang (Universität Mannheim)

Dr. Marco Martini

Prof. Sujeong Shim, PhD (NYU Abu Dhabi)

Tanja Schweinberger (University of Groningen)