On February 1, 2015 Timo Weishaupt joins the University of Göttingen's faculty of social sciences as Professor for Sociology with a Focus on Social Policy. Previously, Timo Weishaupt was Juniorprofessor for the Sociology of Welfare States at the University of Mannheim, a position he had held since January 1, 2011; from September 2008 through December 2010 he was a Postdoc Fellow at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES). Timo Weishaupt received his doctoral degree at the University of Madison-Wisconsin in August 2008. His dissertation was awarded the Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award in recognition of the best dissertation on European Politics and Society filed in 2008 by the American Political Science Association.
Timo Weishaupt's teaching and research foci include historical-comparative welfare state and capitalism studies, analyses of national labor market and social policy and the Public Employment Service, the coordination of European-level labor market and social policy, industrial relations, as well as the methods and theories to explain institutional change. In particular, he investigates social policy reform processes and the role of agency, the interactions between European and national processes, and the influence of normative and cognitive ideas on agents' behavior.
His most important publications comprise his single-authored book From the Manpower Revolution to the Activation Paradigm (Amsterdam University Press, 2011) and an edited volume (published jointly with E. Barcevicius und J. Zeitlin) Assessing the Open Method of Coordination: Institutional Design and National Influence of EU Social Policy Coordination (Palgrave Macmilllan, 2014). His articles appear(ed) in academic journals such as German Politics, Socio-Economic Review, Social Policy and Administration, Politics and Society, and the Zeitschrift für Sozialreform. Moreover, he is periodically asked to write analytic papers on the modernization of Public Employment Services by representatives of international organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) or the European Commission.
Currently, Timo Weishaupt still functions as principal investigator for the project "Welfare State Change from Below" in the context of the SFB-884 Political Economy of Reform at the University of Mannheim. Two further research project proposals on the topic of changing industrial relations in Germany and in European comparison are either under review or in preparation. In the longer run, Timo Weishaupt envisions to expand his expertise by also investigating the geographic region of Asia.