Farewells and a New Member – Changes in the Team of the Professorship

The new winter semester 2023/2024 brought new personnel changes for the professorship: Dr Laura Pantzerhielm and Dr Tim Zajontz have left the chair and moved on to new tasks. We are therefore even more pleased to welcome Dr Jochen Kleinschmidt to the team!

Dr Laura Pantzerhielm has been a member of the professorship as a research assistant and lecturer since October 2019. During her time at TU Dresden, she taught at all levels and in all fields of International Relations (IR). Furthermore, Pantzerhielm conducted interdisciplinary research in the research group Youth Representation in Global Politics (in cooperation with Linköping University) and dedicated herself to her own research interests at the intersection of IR, international political sociology, human rights and global health research. Since the beginning of the year, she has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Methodology at the renowned London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she conducted a research project on critical IR methods from May to October (funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD). She will continue her work at the LSE in the future. Since October, Laura Pantzerhielm is now Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Mälardalen University (MDU) in Sweden. We wish her every success in this new chapter and would like to thank her for the exciting seminars, the always enriching exchange on current debates in IR and her valuable contributions to our research projects.

We also have to say goodbye to Dr Tim Zajontz. He has been a lecturer at our professorship since April 2023. We would like to thank him for his outstanding work in teaching and his commitment to the development of the Master programme International Relations at TU Dresden. Last summer semester, he led both the Master's seminar "Complex Actor Constellations and Horizontal Cooperation in the Transnational Realm" and the seminar "Theories of International Organisations". He was highly appreciated by the students for his dedicated teaching.  During his time at our professorship, he published various academic articles, including one on China's shift from credit-financed to privately financed infrastructure projects in Africa. Dr Tim Zajontz is now taking up a position at the Seminar for Scientific Policy at the University of Freiburg, where he will teach and conduct research as a research assistant. We wish him all the best in this endeavour and hope to see him again soon.

We are therefore all the more pleased to welcome Dr Jochen Kleinschmidt to our team. Dr Kleinschmidt is now Lecturer and Research Associate at the Chair of International Politics at Dresden University of Technology. He received his doctorate summa cum laude from LMU Munich in 2014 with a thesis on the concept of political spatiality in the theory of Niklas Luhmann. Before taking this position at Dresden, he worked at Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt’s Center for Latin American Studies (ZILAS), at the Faculty of International, Political and Urban Studies (FEIPU) of Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá (Colombia) and at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín (Colombia). He was also a visiting fellow at NATO School Oberammergau (Germany) as well as a guest lecturer at the Escuela Superior de Guerra in Bogotá (Colombia) and at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany), among other activities. His research is theoretically oriented by historical sociology and concepts such as global society, multiplicity and heterarchy. Empirically, he studies armed conflict, security studies and military technology, but also questions of political geography. In addition, he is currently interested in questions of future research, posthumanist theories, and political aesthetics. He is currently working on projects on heterarchy and the concept of crisis, cyberpunk aesthetics in world politics, and retrofuturism in international relations. We are looking forward to working together.