Jean Monnet Chair established
Aleksandra Maatsch has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair. Jean Monnet Chair is a prestigious EU grant for university professors to establish a Chair within the area of European studies. In the course of the last call (2021) the European Commission established only one Jean Monnet Chair in Poland. The Chair is administratively embedded at the Willy Brand Centre for German and European Studies, University of Wroclaw.
The JMC lead by Aleksandra Maatsch will study representative democracy in crisis mode, predominantly focusing on the impact of the sovereign debt crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic on representative democracy and its institutions in Europe. Beyond academic research in the abovementioned area, the Chair will deliver teaching and outreach stimulating public and academic discussion regarding contemporary European and Polish politics.
The Jean Monnet Chair is composed of a Chairholder (prof. Aleksandra Maatsch) as well as the core team (dr. Karolina Borońska- Hryniewiecka and dr. Edgars Eihmanis) and partners (prof. Anna Pacześniak).
Aleksandra Maatsch is a professor of political science and the Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies, University of Wrocław. After completing her studies at the Central European University in Budapest (CEU), Aleksandra Maatsch acquired her PhD in political science from the University of Bremen in Germany (2011). She then worked at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPP-CSIC) in Madrid, at the University of Cambridge (POLIS), the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and at the University of Cologne (interim Chair of European and Multilevel Politics). Aleksandra Maatsch acquired her habilitation from the University of Chemnitz (Germany). She specializes in comparative European politics and legislative studies. Her research has been published in various journals such as West European Politics, the Journal of Common Market Studies and the Journal of European Public Policy.
Edgars Eihmanis (PhD) is a political scientist working at the intersection of comparative political economy and public policy. Edgars Eihmanis received master’s degrees in sociology and political science from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD degree in political science from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He has participated in a number of international projects and his research has been published by leading academic outlets. His article on the effects of the European Semester “Cherry-picking external constraints” was published in Journal of European Public Policy. Before joining the University of Wrocław as a researcher in the NCN-funded project PANDEMO (https://www.pandemo.eu), Edgars Eihmanis was a post-doctoral fellow at the EUI, investigating East Central European socio-economic responses to the pandemic.
Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science, University of Wrocław and a visiting fellow at (CESSP) Panthéon-Sorbonne. In the past, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2012-2013), a lecturer at the Masaryk University (2013-2015), head of the EU program at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (2016-2018) and a visiting fellow at (CEE) Sciences Po (2019-2020). Karolina’s research interests lie at the intersection of EU and legislative studies with a special focus on the involvement of parliaments in EU affairs. From 2019 to 2022 she has been a principal investigator in the National Science Centre-funded project “National Parliaments as Multi-Arena Players in the EU?”. Her works appeared in European Political Science Review, Politics and Governance, Journal of European Integration and the Journal of Legislative Studies.
Anna Pacześniak is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wrocław (since 2005) specializing in European and Polish politics as well as comparative political party analysis. From 2011 to 2018 she worked as a lecturer at the Free University of Brussels, in the period 2016-2017 Anna Pacześniak was a fellow at Wallonia-Brussels International. She has conducted various research projects in Poland and abroad, for instance “Européanisation des partis politiques – méthodes d’étude” (research project conducted in 2010 in France). At the University of Wrocław, she leads the research group studying European political processes, she is also a Deputy Director of the Discipline of Political Science and Administration. Anna Pacześniak has published extensively in the area of political parties, the most recent publications being “Party organization and communication in Poland” (Palgrave 2021) or “Comprendre la Pologne. Société, politique et institutions” (Paris 2016).
