CES Executive Committee Election 2024
The Council for European Studies is holding an election for 5 new members of its Executive Committee. Each new member will serve on the Executive Committee from January 1, 2025-June 30, 2028. Please cast your vote using this ballot by December 15, 2024. You can vote for up to 5 people. You must be a CES member to vote for Executive Committee members.
Introducing the Nominees:
Aubrey Westfall
Aubrey L. Westfall is a Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts (Ph.D., University of Colorado). Her research explores the policies and sociopolitical practices regulating the political behavior of minoritized groups within Western democratic societies. She is the author of multiple articles and books, including The Politics of Immigration in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and The Politics of the Headscarf in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2018). At Wheaton, she teaches courses on comparative politics in Europe, international organizations, women and politics, migration, and research methods
I have been drawn to the Council for European Studies because of its inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach, which mirrors my interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. My research regularly draws on history, sociology, psychology, and economics, in addition to political science. I have appreciated how the conference regularly features a number of panels focused on my research interests of immigration and minority politics. The collegial environment of the CES conference makes it easy to make connections with other international scholars, which has enriched my professional networks. I would love to serve on the executive committee in order to provide equally enriching experiences to other scholars. As a professor at a teaching-focused liberal arts institution, I can represent the interests of those at similar institutions, who conduct research with significantly fewer resources compared to those at research institutions.
Bryan Arva
Dr. Bryan Arva is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology in the School of Public Affairs at American University. Additionally, he is currently the Director of the Counterterrorism and Homeland Security Master's program and the Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy Master's program. He serves as co-chair of the Radicalism and Violence Research Network at CES and is on the program committee for the upcoming CES 2025 conference in Philadelphia. Prior to coming to American University, he worked as a Researcher and Instructor at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland. His research and teaching interests include terrorism, counterterrorism, homeland security, radicalization, preventing violent extremism, and the effects of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) on political violence.
From the first CES conference I attended, I knew I had found my community. As can be seen by my service to CES as a co-chair of a research network and a program committee member, I have become fully invested in this organization. I would love to continue this service to my community as a member of the Executive Committee. As a member of the committee, I would be a voice for early career researchers. The new generation of grad students and early professionals are doing amazing and innovative research. They need to be supported and offered an opportunity to present their research, and I think CES could be the perfect place for them to find a community. I also view myself as a connector. I want to help grow CES and I think one of the best ways to do so is for more collaboration across research networks. In my role as an Executive Committee member, I will help make these connections and forge these relationships. By creating these synergies across units, we will be able to foster a greater sense of community and lead our organization to great future successes.
Dagmar Soennecken
Dagmar Soennecken is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy & Administration at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is also cross-appointed to the Law & Society Program there. Her research focuses on comparative public policy in the EU and North America. She is particularly interested in questions concerning law and the courts as well as citizenship and migration, including refugees. In 2019, she became the Editor-in-Chief of Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. Her work has been published in Comparative Migration Studies, Law & Policy, Droit et Société, Politics and Governance among others.
As a future CES executive member, I would be eager to enhance and expand the vital role that CES has played as a leading, interdisciplinary forum for the transatlantic exchange of ideas about Europe through its conferences, publications, and awards.
As a member of CES's research network on immigration, I have firsthand experience with how these interdisciplinary networks serve as the core of this vibrant exchange and also as a welcoming, supportive space for mentoring emerging scholars. To build on this tradition of mentorship, I propose the introduction of early-career scholar workshops before the main CES conference, complementing CES’s existing efforts to support PhD students. In my role as editor-in-chief of an academic journal, I have participated and/or organized similar events and I have seen consistently positive feedback from participants, underscoring the value of such initiatives.
Additionally, as someone based in an interdisciplinary Public Policy School, I am committed to expanding CES’s engagement with policy professionals beyond academia. Given the current wave of populism sweeping Europe, it is crucial to continue to make our research findings accessible to a broad audience by communicating them in clear, concise language or in alternate formats. This approach will help ensure that our scientific insights are available not only to our academic peers but also to policymakers and the general public, who are in urgent need of reliable information.
Elke Winter
Elke Winter is a professor of Sociology at the bilingual University of Ottawa/Université d’Ottawa. An alumna of the German National Scholarship Foundation, she is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and served as Harvard’s William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies. She wrote Max Weber et les relations ethniques. Du refus du biologisme racial à l’État multinational (PUL 2004), won the Canadian Sociology Association’s John Porter Tradition of Excellence Award for Us, Them, and Others: Pluralism and National Identity in Diverse Societies (UTP 2011), and (co-)edited several volumes, such as When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents (Routledge 2020) and Middle Class Nation Building Through Immigration? (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2024). Her current work examines how neoliberalism refashions societal (dis)integration along and across ethnic and racial fault lines.
CES has been an intellectual home for me for over fifteen years. I organized my first panel through the Network on Immigration at its 2010 conference in Montreal – a stimulating conference that will be remembered for grounded planes due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull. I will bring to the Executive Committee a true transatlantic comparative perspective with fieldwork and research collaborations in several European countries, and a deep anchoring in the French-, German- and English-speaking literatures and scholarly traditions (as well as some knowledge of Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese.) Being based at Canada’s largest French/English bilingual university, situated in the nation’s capital, I have also held research positions at leading institutions in Europe and the US, notably at Université Paris Cité, the Universities of Heidelberg and Konstanz, as well as Harvard University, to name just a few. In short, I am deeply committed to the cause. I can draw upon experience and ideas from other committee work and leadership positions (e.g. Canadian Sociological Association), and I have reached a moment in my career when I have the “leisure” to take on this kind of responsibility. In terms of content, I feel that it is more important than ever to support Early Career Researchers, foster transatlantic collaboration, and facilitate comparative research that is both nuanced and comprehensive, and that raises awareness and understanding in difficult geopolitical times. While personally, I am most familiar with the Western European and North American contexts, I would welcome a discussion about CES strengthening its efforts to invite (more) scholarship from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Mexico
Georg Menz
Georg Menz is Dragas Chair of International Politics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Previously, he was Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. His research areas of interest are comparative and international political economy, labor and social policy, and the politics of immigration. His main publications are “Comparative Political Economy” (Oxford, 2018), “The Political Economy of Managed Migration (2009) and “Varieties of Capitalism and Europeanization” (2005), alongside numerous journal articles.
My vision for the Council of European Studies is to emphasize and reinvigorate the trans-Atlantic nature of the organization. For some time now, European studies in the United States have suffered from declining student numbers, lackluster funding by universities and funding bodies, and a concomitant decline in faculty openings. I hope to contribute to a renaissance of interest and institution-building on European affairs in the US. In addition, with political instability and economic stagnation in Europe and a new administration in Washington, transatlantic relations are entering a new phase of turbulence. Drawing on my years of experience in living and working in Europe, I hope to reinvigorate CES as a scholarly venue for transatlantic dialogue. These two goals are mutually reinforcing, rather than exclusive. There are numerous policy challenges that are fire for scholarly exploration and pertain to both sides of the Atlantic. I hope to contribute to strengthening CES as a place in which such exploration can unfold.
Gülce Safak Özdemir
I hold a PhD in Sociology from the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) under the supervision of Prof. Matthias vom Hau. My dissertation contributed to both theoretical and empirical discussions on the governance of irregular migration and the experiences of irregular migrants at the city level. After my PhD, I worked at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) on the ERC project Migration and Democratic Diffusion (MIGRADEMO).
Currently, I serve as an elected co-chair of the Immigration Research Network of the Council for European Studies (CES) at Columbia University, and I am an affiliated researcher with several projects, including Urban Sanctuary, Migrant Solidarity, and Hospitality in Global Perspective at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Local Responses to Precarious Migrants in Spanish Cities (MUNMIGRA) at UPF.
Over the years, I have contributed to various research initiatives, including my role as an independent consultant for the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), focusing on affirmative action policies for ethnic and religious minorities. During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at top-tier institutions like EUI, the Max Planck Institute, and Aalborg University.
As a member of the Executive Committee of CES, I hope to contribute my expertise in migration studies, focusing on irregular migration, social inequality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in urban settings. As a researcher from the Global South, I bring a unique perspective that reflects the challenges faced by marginalized communities, which I aim to highlight in our discussions. Through my research and collaborative work, I seek to advance CES’s mission by fostering inclusive dialogues, promoting innovative research, and enhancing the visibility of diverse perspectives in European studies. I look forward to contributing to the development of stronger academic networks and enriching the scope of research within the CES community.
Isabelle Hare
Isabelle Hare has a HDR (Supervisor Researcher Habilitation, 2024) and a PHD in Science of Information and Communication (2007). She is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Communication (ICOM) at Lumière - Lyon 2 University (France) and, from September 2023, and Co-Director of the information and communication research unity ELICO (Lyon University, France). At the same time, she is very involved in the life of her university: she is elected to the Research Committee, the Academic Council and the Social Committee of Lumière- Lyon 2 University. She is also an active member of the National Council of Universities (CNU) in France.
Her researches focus on three main topics: medias discourses in situations of physical and symbolic violence in Europe; French digital news media and new journalistic discursive practices; and finally actors representations of open data in local and national areas . All these researches touch on the question of media discourses, whether through the contents or the devices that support them.
My desire to become an executive member and to contribute as such to the activities of the CES can be summed up in three points:
Firstly, it is the continuation of a gradual path towards and with the CES since 2021, first from a distance (paper for the 27th CES in 2021), then much closer as co- chair of LOC and member of scientific committee) of the 30 CES which took place in Lyon in July 2024. The collective and collaborative work carried out over a year with several members of the executive committee and staff to prepare the conference (Karen Anderson, Eammon Butler McIntosh & Nathalia Nascimento), gave me a better understanding of what the CES is, its research areas and its commitments.
Secondly, my institutional and scientific commitments reflect my desire to work for and within a group, because it has always seemed to me that we make better and faster progress in a group than on our own. From now on, I would like to work alongside an international group in order to support research in an even more cross-disciplinary way in its capacity to set milestones, to encourage, promote and reward those who scientifically - but also humanely - address societal questions and issues, past, present or future, in the European field and more widely around the world.
Lastly, the issues addressed by the CES through its various activities (support and solidarity, conferences and publications, fundraising and grants) and thematics (safety, environmental and social responsibility, democracy) are fully in line with my research interests and my personal and academic commitment to respecting freedom of expression - for citizens, the media and scientists.
Marius R Busemeyer
Marius R. Busemeyer is a Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His work focuses on comparative political economy and welfare state research, in particular public attitudes towards the welfare state as well as the political causes and consequences of inequality. Before coming to Konstanz, he worked as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He held visiting professor- and fellowships at, for example, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the WZB Berlin, the Amsterdam Center for Inequality Studies (AMCIS) and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His publications include Skills and Inequality (Winner of the 2015 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research) as well as large number of peer-reviewed articles in leading journals.
The Council for European Studies (CES) Annual Conference has been my favorite conference for many years, because the CES community is unique in bringing together scholars from different disciplines, different world regions as well as different career levels. As a founding co-director of the resarch network „Political Economy and Welfare“ - which has become one the largest CES research networks at CES - I have always been interested in and committed to promting the further development of CES as a scholarly organisation and community. I would love to continue and expand my engagement for CES. My „mission“ would be to further promote the role of CES as a forum for interdisciplinary exchange by proactively reaching out to young scholars in the fields of political economy and economics in particular, since the latter discipline has been somewhat less present at the CES compared to other social sciences. Furthermore, given recent political developments in both Europe and the US, I see value in creating new opportunities for exchange between scholars working on American and European politics, potentially in the form of pre-conference workshops. Against the background of fundamental challenges to the Western model of liberal democracy on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems both timely and necessary to develop joint research perspectives on these challenges.
Veronica Anghel
Veronica Anghel is Assistant Professor at the Robert Schuman Center of the European University Institute (RSC-EUI). She works at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, and studies European integration and democracy building. From her RSC-EUI position she co-leads the ‘EU Enlargement Hub’ and the ‘Transatlantic Program’. Her work was published, among others, in the Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, East European Politics and Political Communication, and in edited volumes with, among others, Oxford University Press. She received the inaugural 2021 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Rising Star Award. Veronica is an Associate Editor for the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP). Previously, Veronica held teaching positions and research fellowships at, among others, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Stanford University (Fulbright), and the European University Institute (Max Weber).
As a CES Executive Committee member, I aim to bring diverse insights from my research and background to shape our strategic agenda, support our community’s transatlantic coordination goals, and offer guidance to the chair and director on resource allocation and priority setting from the perspective of a Europe-based scholar with strong U.S. ties. My professional outlook and research interests align closely with CES’s commitment to pluralism. My publications cover European integration, party politics, coalition formation, political behavior, area studies, and the transatlantic relationship, and they reflect my commitment to methodological diversity. This broad portfolio enables me to build bridges across communities, including the policy sector, and to assess originality and methodological rigor across varied research areas. My role at the European University Institute (EUI) connects me to a large network of Europe-based scholars, advancing CES’s outreach goals. Additionally, as an Associate Editor for JEPP, the leading European political science journal, I can strengthen CES’s visibility by fostering connections with an extensive network of scholars.
Yasemin Irepoglu Carreras
Dr. Yasemin Irepoglu Carreras is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Political Science department of the University of California, Riverside. She has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MA in European Studies from the University of Amsterdam, where she studied as a Jean Monnet scholar.
Dr. Irepoglu Carreras’ fields of research and teaching are comparative politics and international relations, with primary focus on European politics, comparative federalism, governance, climate change and inequality. Dr. Irepoglu Carreras is the Co-Chair of the Territorial Politics and Federalism Research Network of the Council for European Studies since 2022.
Her solo and co-authored articles have appeared in Comparative Political Studies (an article on the determinants of Brexit), Electoral Studies, European Policy Analysis, Turkish Studies and Regional Studies, Regional Science. She has a book manuscript, entitled, "Decentralization, Interactive Governance and Income Inequality in Europe", which examines this topic through case studies of Spain, Germany, France, and Sweden (under contract with Palgrave).
I am excited to be nominated to the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies. If I am elected, I would like to focus my contributions to the mission of CES around these two themes: 1) cultivating meaningful scholarly exchanges between disciplines represented in CES and its research networks, 2) developing programming on how scholarship and teaching can inform each other in European Studies.
To cultivate more interdisciplinary scholarly exchanges, we can better utilize the existing institutional structure of the research networks and regularize hybrid/online workshops, in addition to the yearly conference. Some of these workshops can focus more on teaching and learning on Europe in addition to academic and policy research. CES is uniquely positioned to provide more of that for its members as an interdisciplinary institution. Teaching at a university geographically far from Europe has allowed me to better grasp how scholarship and teaching on Europe go hand in hand, and how the “idea of Europe” can be transmitted. I plan to work on creating more funding and mentorship opportunities for graduate students and extending the mission of CES to undergraduate students who can get started with research on Europe before embarking on graduate studies. Furthermore, I would like to work on establishing an updated CES publication/blog/social media account, which communicates the a) insights from the academic research of our member experts to a broader audience, b) insights from European studies teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level.
