I studied at Freie Universität Berlin and at St. Antony’s College, OxfordUniversity. I received my PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Before joining AarhusUniversity, I was Research Fellow at the European University Institute. In between academic career steps I founded a company and worked as project manager and consultant for an international NGO in Geneva as well as for the Council of Europe.

Recently, I had the pleasure to coordinate two projects on transnational conceptual history: 1)Together with Bo Stråth, I ventured into Global Translations of the Social and the Economic in Europe and Asia (2007-2011) and 2) Together with colleagues from Aarhus and further afield I explored Zero Hours: Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings in the Twentieth Century from a Global Perspective (2009-2014). Since February 2013, I direct the collaborative research project Towards Good Society: Conceptualizing the Social Through the Economic from the 1930s until Today (2013-2016), which received funding from VELUX foundation.

I published within the fields of European history, European integration, urban history, travel and tourism, historiography, cultural history, transnational and global history. Mostly, I prefer a conceptual historical approach to my research, which also leads me to write on more theoretical, interdisciplinary issues such as the European public sphere, sovereignty and the welfare state or to focus on the conceptual history economic thought and its social imagination. Theoretically and methodologically, I have recently worked on global conceptual history as a new approach to historical investigation and on ways of breaking with the past and thus on the role of time, temporalisation and historicisation. 

My latest monograph (2010), co-authored with Bo Stråth, entitled The Political History of European Integration. The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-market, London, Routledge, was short-listed for the European Book Prize 2011. 

I supervise PhDs in the field of conceptual history, intellectual history, European history, global history, economic thought, development studies, and memory studies. My MA students write their theses in all the above-mentioned fields as well as on the history of human rights, governance and transnational CSR, regime change, democratization, and minorities such as the Roma in Europe.