Tobias Lenz will assume the post of Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) for Global Governance and Comparative Regionalism at the Department of Political Science in cooperation with the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, in December 2013. In his research he studies the dynamics of institutional change in international organizations.
He holds a Bachelor in European Studies with a minor in economics from the University of Osnabrück, as well as a M.Phil in Politics and a D.Phil in International Relations, both from Oxford University, UK. In his doctoral dissertation, supervised by Prof. Kalypso Nicolaïdis, he examines the diffusion of the European Union’s model of regional integration as a factor affecting the institutional evolution of regional organizations in the global South. During his D.Phil studies, he spent several months as a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin (Research College ‚The Normative Power of Europe’) and at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US.
Prior to his appointment in Göttingen, Tobias Lenz was a post-doctoral fellow at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. In a project funded by the European Research Council and directed by Prof. Liesbet Hooghe and Prof. Gary Marks he studies variation in the institutional design of international organizations. During this period, he spent a semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US.
His research interests concern the comparative analysis of international organizations, with a focus on international regional organizations including the European Union. He also studies the European Union as an actor in international politics. Theoretically, he is mainly interested in diffusion approaches.