Farewells and New Members - Changes in the Team of the Professorship

The winter semester 2022/23 brought great changes to the professorship: As sad as we are to say goodbye to our esteemed colleagues Martin Fischer and Dr. Christine Andrä, the more we are happy to welcome our new colleagues, Stefanie Gerstenberger and Elias Wittenstein.

We thank Dr. Christine Andrä for her excellent work in teaching, especially during the very demanding Corona semesters. For this, she was awarded the 2021 Teaching Prize of the Society of Friends and Sponsors of TU Dresden. Absolutely enriching for us was her high-quality research on international and domestic violent conflicts and the connection between knowledge and international politics. She will take up a new position at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG), where she will teach and research as Assistant Professor for International Relations and Security Studies at the Department of International Relations and International Organisation. We wish her all the best for this journey and above all patience and joy in learning Dutch.

We also have to say goodbye to Martin Fischer. He himself graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Institute of Political Science in Dresden in 2017 and has enriched the Chair of International Politics with his research and teaching since 2021. In his new position as Parliamentary Advisor for Higher Education and Science in the parliamentary group B90/The Greens in the Saxon State Parliament, he has the opportunity to actively participate in ongoing legislative amendments and parliamentary initiatives. We wish him much success on this new path and thank him sincerely for his excellent supervision of students and work on the professorship.

We are all the more pleased to welcome two new members to the professorship:

From now on, Elias Wittenstein will support us at both the Centre for International Studies and the Chair of International Politics. The former Research Assistant at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf holds a two-subject M.A. in Political Science and Ethnology with a focus on International Relations from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. As part of a DFG project, he has conducted research on sources of legitimacy of regional organisations in the Global South, and for his field research on the Arab League, the African Union and ASEAN, Elias spent several months in Cairo, Addis Ababa and Jakarta. We look forward to supporting him in his research interests of European foreign, security and partnership policy and welcome him to the team.

Some may already know Stefanie Gerstenberger through her work at the Chair of Political Systems and System Comparison, where she has been since 2017. Prior to that, she completed her Bachelor's degree in Political Science in Chemnitz and earned a Master's degree in International Relations at Uniwersytet Wrocławski with a stay abroad at Sciences Po Bordeaux. At the Institute of Political Science in Dresden, she mainly conducted research in the field of policy analysis on economic policy, environmental policy and internal security and was also involved in projects such as CouReg. We are very pleased that she has been part of the team of the professorship since the start of the current winter semester. With her warm manner, she will also be a real enrichment for the Bachelor's students as their new subject advisor.