kopfmaennchen

Wintersemester 2009/2010 was my first semester with five seminars to be taught. These were the Undergraduate Courses “Introduction to Political Science” and “Lehrforschungsprojekt 1”, the Graduate courses “Systems Theory in Social Sciences” and “International Political Economy” ; and a colloquium for exam candidates. Together with 5 hours of student advisory a week, this was a semester the workload of which I roughly underestimated. Especially the abpout 1200 pages of thesises that had to be corrected, lied heavily on my desk. Some still lie there uncorrected, but will be processed until next monday, when the Summersemester starts. Never the less I managed to attend the ECPR Joint Sessions in late March and to participate in a workshop on “Comparing Autocracies”. This was a inspiring experience, especially because continental-european and anglo-american research traditions a kind of clashed within the workshop. But still, all of them, in-depth case studies, small- and medium-n comparisions and large-n numbercrunching, are quite interesting and powerful in their way.

Summersemester 2010 will bring four seminars for me: “Lehrforschungsprojekt 2” and “Political Economy” at the undergraduate level and “Political Transformations: Democratic Regression” at the graduate level, and another colloquium. Especially the seminar on democratic regression will be an interesting one due to two reasons: first, it is a topic that is underresearched both empirically and theoretically, so that there remain many questions open and discussions will be quite hot and fruitful. Second, I will give this seminar together with Juan Albarracín, a collegue and good friend of mine, now living, researching and teaching in Cali, Columbia after finishing his Master here in Tuebingen.

Further Informations on the seminars in Political Science in Summersemester 2010 can be found at the campus-site of  Tuebingen University