Biography

Dr. Anja Thomas holds a doctoral degree by Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Cologne. Before coming to the EUI, Anja was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) of the University of Oxford, where she is affiliated to the Maison française d’Oxford and Nuffield College.

Anja is studying the link between Europeanisation and national elite’s discourse on the future trajectory of European integration. At the EUI, she will be studying the emergence of different clusters of parliaments in the EU in which MPs’ share the same role understandings. From a more theoretical perspective, Anja is interested in the question of how sociological approaches, in particular Max Weber’s ‘old’ institutionalism, help better to understand institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation processes in the EU and their effects. Her book Assemblée nationale, Bundestag and the European Union. The micro-sociological causes of the European integration paradox (Studies of the European Union Series, Baden-Baden: NOMOS) drawn from her award-winning PhD thesis will be published in autumn 2019.

Anja is also member of the ‘Expert group on national parliaments in the EU architecture’ at the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance.

She has taught extensively on all levels of the curriculum on issues linked to the EU’s polity and governance, comparative politics and political science approaches and methods in university institutions in France, Germany and throughout Europe, most recently in the European Affairs Master’s of Sciences Po Paris and the University of Nantes.