Biography
Carlos Closa is currently Vice President for Organization and Institutional Relations of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Research Professor at the Institute of Public Policies and Goods (IPP-CSIC).
He was part-time professor at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) of the European University Institute (EUI). Prior, he was Deputy Director of Studies and Research at the CEPC (Ministry of the Presidency), member of the Venice Commission for Democracy through Law (Council of Europe). He was a full professor at the University of Zaragoza and an assistant professor at the UCM. He was Jean Monnet Fellow and Salvador de Madariaga Fellow (IUE), and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and Senior Emile Noël Fellow at NYU, as well as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges), and multiple universities, such as: Gröningen, Maastricht, Adger, Passau, etc.
He has collaborated with the European Commission (Office of Commissioners Timmermans and Jourova and DG Justice, Freedom and Security); the European Parliament (Constitutional Commission) and with the Bureau of Policy Advisers (BEPA) of the President of the European Commission; the Council of Europe; the Committee of the Regions of the EU; the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); the Spanish Agency for Cooperation (AECID) and the Friedrich Neumann Foundation and the Notre Europe Foundation. He has also participated in training programmes of the Council of Europe and is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies (RIE). He regularly collaborates (on reports and studies) with the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies and the Alternativas Foundation.
He is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País and Agenda Pública. He belongs to the Editorial Board of 10 international journals and is a regular reviewer for more than 30 titles in his discipline.
In recent years he has edited with Lorenzo Cassini, a volume on comparative regionalism Comparative Regional Integration Governance and Legal Models (Cambridge University Press, 2016); with Dimitry Kochenov on the protection of the rule of law in the EU Reinforcing rule of law oversight in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and a third on withdrawal and secession in the EU (2017) Secession from an EU member state and withdrawal from the Union: Troubled membership (Cambridge University Press). His latest work, with Giuseppe Martinico and Costanza Magiorta, is Between Democracy and Law. The Amorality of Secession (Routledge; 2019).
In recent years, he has taught master's and doctoral courses at the Pontifical University of Comillas, the San Pablo CEU University and the UCM and in the past he also taught master's courses at the UC3M and the Rey Juan Carlos University. Between 2021 and 2024, he taught a course on Comparative Regional at the Florence STG of the EUI, which was highly rated by students.