Natasha Wunsch
Prof. Dr.
natasha.wunsch@unifr.ch
+41 26 300 7762
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8715-1335
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Ordentliche_r Professor_in,
Departement für Europastudien und Slavistik
PER 21 bu. D429
Bd de Pérolles 90
1700 Fribourg
European Integration; EU enlargement; Euroscepticism
Democratisation; democracy promotion; democratic backsliding
Biografie
Natasha Wunsch joined the University of Fribourg in 2023 as Professor of European Studies as well as co-director of the Centre for European Studies and head of the MA in European Studies. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science/European Integration at Sciences Po Paris, Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. She is currently Chair of the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union.
Natasha Wunsch received her PhD from University College London in 2016 and defended her habilitation at ETH Zurich in 2023. Previously, she completed a dual Master’s degree in European Studies and Political Science at Sciences Po Paris and the Free University of Berlin. In addition to her academic activities, she sits on the Academic Advisory Committee of the German Council on Foreign Relations and on the Academic Advisory Board of the Institute for European Politics. She is also a member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group.
Her research interests lie at the interface between European and comparative politics. She studies processes of democracy promotion as well as democratic regression primarily in the post-communist space and is interested in the implications of current challenges to liberal democracy for European cooperation and the process of European integration. Her research has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Common Market Studies and Democratization, among others. In a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione), she is currently investigating the role of citizens’ democratic attitudes in processes of democratic erosion.