Key Staff Members | 2023-2026

Cemil Aydin

Cemil Aydin is Professor of Global History at UNC. His main interests are comparative and transnational modern world history, with area foci on Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. He is the author of two books, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007) and The Idea of the Muslim World (Harvard University Press, 2017). He has contributed articles to leading journals in history. In 2018, he and his co-authors published an English edition of a scholarly text on World History, An Emerging Modern World: 1750–1870 (Harvard University Press).

Chad Bryant

Chad Bryant is a professor of history at UNC Chapel Hill and a co-winner of the 2022 Radomír Luža Prize. His interests include nationalism and the urban experience in modern Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the lands of today’s Czech Republic. His most recent book focuses on the capital city of Prague and questions of belonging in the modern era. He is, with Kateřina Čapková and Diana Dumitru, completing a study of the Stalinist-era show trials in Czechoslovakia.

Tori Ekstrand

Victoria “Tori” Smith Ekstrand has been a media law and free expression scholar for more than two decades. Before that, she worked as a senior executive for The Associated Press at its headquarters in New York City. She is currently serving a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she leads UNC’s premier doctoral fellows program and its annual Royster Global conference with UNC’s strategic global partners. She has published articles in top communications journals and law reviews, including Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal and Communication Law & Policy. Along with Caitlin Carlson and Erin Coyle, she is the new lead editor for The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication, one of top media law texts for schools of media and journalism in the U.S., and the first media law textbook with all female scholars. The eighth edition will be published in 2023.

Joanneke Fleischauer

Joanneke Fleischauer is responsible for information literacy instruction for West European Studies. She is also the coordinator for the First Year Seminar Scavenger Hunts. After pursuing degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Library Information Sciences she has worked in many different types of libraries.

Her main interests are library instruction, information literacy and identifying new ways to introduce users to the library. She serves on several professional committees for the European Studies Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries which promotes the improvement of library services and supports study and research in European affairs.

Greg Gangi

In his teaching, Greg Gangi conveys a complex understanding of environmental challenges and explores innovative solutions. His teaching extends beyond the classroom as he leads students to many countries to learn firsthand about global change and innovation. He organized several educational trips to Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic nations. Given the role that South Korea and China play in shaping the future of technology, he plans to guide students in learning from these two nations. Gangi received various awards at UNC and a national award for his advising and mentoring of students. In 2014, he was awarded the NACADA Award for Outstanding Faculty Advisor. He received the Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence in 2010 and the University recognized him with the Massey Award for Outstanding Service in 2018. In addition to his teaching, Gangi works to create networks in North Carolina between industry, academia, and government to help strengthen innovation. He also seeks to foster international networks that connect companies in the Clean Tech sector with North Carolina. He defines clean technology broadly to include companies in clean energy, smart cities, water technologies, innovations to make transportation more sustainable, building technologies and solutions that improve food security and agricultural sustainability. He is the lead organizer of the annual UNC Cleantech Summit, which represents the largest event of its kind in the southeastern region of the United States.

Banu Gökarıksel

Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and Global Studies, and the Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The Graduate School. Her main interests are the politics of Muslim identities and spaces, with a focus on the intersections of religion and gender. She has been conducting multimethod research in Turkey and Europe since 1996. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. She has published more than twenty five articles and book chapters and edited two special issues of journals. She is currently working on a book about how a heightened sense of sectarian divisions are affecting everyday life and relations between neighbours in urban Turkey. She is also co-editing a book on feminist geography and a special issue on Muslim women’s geographies for the journal Political Geography.

Liesbet Hooghe

Liesbet Hooghe is the W.R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC, and Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She is the past Chair of the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association and of the EU Studies Association. Her interests lie in European integration, multilevel governance, decentralization, international organization, and political parties. Recent books include Measuring International Authority (Oxford University Press, 2017, multi-authored), Community, Scale and Regional Governance (OUP, 2016 with Gary Marks), Measuring Regional Authority (OUP, 2016, multi-authored), and The European Commission in the 21st Century (OUP, 2013, multi-authored). She is the co-editor of a series on Transformations in Governance with OUP.

Evelyne Huber

Evelyne Huber is the Morehead Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science. She is the author and co-author of five books, including Capitalist Development and Democracy (with Dietrich Rueschemeyer and John D. Stephens, 1992); Development and Crisis of the Welfare State (with John D. Stephens, 2001); and Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality in Latin America (with John. D. Stephens, 2012), all winners of book awards. She has also contributed articles on social policy and political economy in the EU and Latin America to leading journals in political science and sociology. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bern in 2010.

Konrad Jarausch

Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of European Civilization in the Department of History. He has written or edited over 40 books in modern German and European history. Most recently, he wrote Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2015) focusing on the theme “Taming Modernity.” He has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German and European history, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, and the cultural history of the Cold War. He has been involved in discussions about quantitative methods in history, problems of postmodernism, and questions of European memory culture as well as the US-EU partnership. Jarausch recently published: “The European Project: A Critical Reconsideration” in a new volume on EU Foreign Policy edited by Kiran Klaus Patel. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and co-directed a new research institute on contemporary history, the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany.

Priscilla Layne

Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German, Adjunct Associate Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, and affiliated with the Global Cinema Studies Program. She has guest lectured at Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen and at Universität Bremen. Layne focuses on sci-fi, cinema, and Black culture in Germany and Europe. Her first book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She is also the co-editor of the volume Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art (2008). She is working on a monograph, Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism. She held a Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in fall 2018. She has published articles on German film, literature, translation and music in German Studies Review, the Women in German Yearbook and Colloquia Germanica.

Christiane Lemke

Christiane Lemke is Emerita Professor of Political Science and International Relations and former Director of the Jean Monnet European Center of Excellence at Leibniz University Hannover/Germany. She received her PhD and her second PhD (Habilitation) at the Free University Berlin. Lemke held several visiting professor positions at universities in the U.S., including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (DAAD-Professor 1988-1991), Harvard University (1991-92; 2001), and NYU where she was the Max Weber Chair in German and European Politics (2010-2014). She was also the first woman to be director of state parliament in Lower Saxony. Her research focuses on German politics, European affairs, and transatlantic relations. She has published widely on regime transition, migration, populism, climate change policy and women in leadership. She is also a media expert on American politics. In 2023, Christiane Lemke received the Volkmar and Margret Sander Prize for outstanding contributions to the cultural relationship between the German speaking world and the United States.

Gary Marks

Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor of Political Science at UNC and a visiting Robert Schuman Fellow at European University Institute in Florence. In 2010 he was awarded a Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Research Prize) for his contributions to political science. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively, and served as Director until 2006. He has co-led the Chapel Hill Expert Survey of European political parties since 1999. Marks has published widely in the leading journals of political science and sociology. His (co-) authored books include Measuring international Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory, Vol. III (OUP, 2017, multi-authored); Scale and Regional Governance (OUP, 2016 with Liesbet Hooghe); and Multi-Level Governance and European Integration (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001 with Liesbet Hooghe).

Holger Moroff

Holger Moroff is DAAD visiting assistant professor and has taught international and comparative politics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena since 2002. Before that he was a senior research fellow at the Institute for European Politics (IEP) in Berlin. He studied political science and economics at Washington University in St. Louis and the universities of Bochum and Bonn. His research focuses on security theories and European integration as well as on comparative political corruption and the internationalization of anti-corruption regimes. He is the editor of the book “European soft security policies” (2002), co-editor of “Anti-corruption for Eastern Europe” (forthcoming 2009) and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Susan Dabney Pennybacker

Susan Pennybacker is the Chalmers W. Poston Distinguished Professor of European History. She is a modern British historian whose work is on the long British twentieth century in a global context. She is completing a monograph on London refuge and political exile from 1945 to 1994, which considers the lives of individuals moving in and out of the metropolis, three crucial points of activist engagement amongst the former imperial and colonial intelligentsia, and their circles. She works extensively in archives in the UK, New Delhi, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Port of Spain. She has connections with key groups at UNC, who are concerned with the EU and its critics: Modern British historians in the Triangle as well as those in related disciplines; graduate students who work on Europe and non-European areas that interface with the UK and Europe, emphasizing global and transnational scholarship, and PhD work that applies those methodologies and crossing extra-European boundaries.

Courtney Rivard

Courtney Rivard, Ph.D. is the Director of the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab and Assistant Professor in English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The DLC serves as a hub for innovation in the humanities that focuses on digital literacy, public humanities, digital humanities, and critical game studies. Her research is at the intersection of Rhetoric & Composition and Digital Humanities. Dr. Rivard’s scholarship, teaching, and administrative service all share a commitment to developing interdisciplinary collaborative approaches that center humanistic inquiry alongside computational methods. She is interested in how the information infrastructure of archives create arguments regarding race, gender, class, and national belonging. More specifically, her scholarship is motivated by questions such as how do the information infrastructure of archives and digital collections create arguments regarding race, gender, class, and national belonging? How can interdisciplinary methods that combine close textual analysis and computational analysis be used to address silences in archival records? And how can scholars imagine new forms of scholarship that leverage the potential of digital modalities to reach wider audiences?

Milada Vachudova

Milada Vachudova is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Global Studies. She publishes on EU enlargement and political change in post-communist Europe. Her expertise includes European security, economic reform, corruption and rule of law. Her book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. She is working on a book on EU leverage in the Western Balkans. She helps lead the Chapel Hill Expert Survey on the positions of political parties on EU-related issues, having added the post-communist EU countries and candidates to the survey. Vachudova was a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford and has held fellowships from several institutions including the European University Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University.