Professors 2019
Anton Hemerijck – Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Director of Graduate Studies
Anton Hemerijck joined the EUI, as Professor of Political Science and Sociology, in January 2017. Trained as an economist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, he took his doctorate from Oxford University. In his capacity of Dean of the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, together with Jonathan Zeitlin, he founded with the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE). He also directed the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principle think tank in the Netherlands, while holding a professorship in Comparative European Social Policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Between 1996 and 2000 he was senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In addition, he has held numerous visiting appointments, ranging from MIT to the University of Lisbon, the University of Antwerp, the Collegio Carlo Alberto of Turin University. Between 2014 and 2017, Anton Hemerijck was Centennial Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Over the past decade, he frequently served as an advisor on social policy, social investment and the welfare state for the European Commission. Key publications include Changing Welfare States (2013) and The Uses of Social Investment (2017), both published with Oxford University Press.
Research interests: the social investment in Europe and beyond; the politics of inter-temporal policy choice; open institutionalism as corrective to prevailing determinist account of policy legacies, political institutions, and their socioeconomic impact.
Fabrizio Bernardi – Professor of Sociology, Head of Department
Fabrizio Bernardi joined the EUI in January 2010, while on leave from the UNED, Spain. He received his PhD in sociology and social research from the University of Trento. He has taught at the faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, from 1998 to 2001 and at the UNED, Spain, from 2001 to 2010. Between 2007 and 2009 he was senior researcher on social stratification and inequality at the Juan March Institute, Madrid. Since 2013 he is the elected Chair of the Board of the European Consortium for Social Research. He is also a founding member of the Comparative Life Course and Inequality Research Centre at the EUI. His most recent publications deal with educational inequalities, returns to education in a comparative EU perspective and the consequences of parental separation for children’s educational outcomes.
Research interests: Inequality in Educational Opportunities, Social Mobility, Educational Returns, Family and Labour Market Dynamics and Inequality, Research Design and Methodology (quantitative).
Juho Härkönen – Professor of Sociology
Juho Härkönen joined the EUI in February 2018, while on leave from Stockholm University. He took his Ph.D. from the EUI in 2007, and was postdoc at Yale before moving to Stockholm in 2009. He was visiting professor at the University of Turku (2010-18). At the EUI, he is co-director of the Comparative Life Course and Inequality Research Centre, and of Florence Population Studies.
Research interests: Life course research, social stratification, family demography, health, comparative research.
Ellen M. Immergut – Chair in Political Sciences
Ellen M. Immergut joined the EUI as Chair in Political Science in September 2017. She is on leave from her position as Chair in Comparative Politics at Humboldt Universität Berlin and has previously held professorships at the University of Konstanz and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her BA, MA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. She is currently Scientific Programme Coordinator for the transnational research programme Welfare State Futures (WSF), launched by the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE). The WSF programme features a Europe-wide network of researchers gathered around fifteen large projects comprising 60 principal investigators and more than 200 researchers designed to ask, and answer, fundamental questions about the design, delivery and experience of welfare in the 21st century from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. She delivered the State of the Union address at the 2018 State of the Union Conference on “Solidarity in Europe”.
Research interests: The impact of electoral and political competition on welfare state reforms; policy responsiveness and policy feedback effects; health politics in Europe; and the consequences of right-wing populism for social policies. She has published on Health Politics, Pension Politics, and more generally on welfare state reform, and institutionalist theory.
Andrea Sangiovanni – Professor of Social and Political Theory
Andrea Sangiovanni joined the SPS Department in September 2018 as Chair in Social and Political Theory. He is also Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London (on leave). Before joining the Philosophy Department at King’s College London (in 2007), he was a Randall Dillard Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge (2005-2007). His main areas of research are in contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy. Recent publications include: ‘Solidarity as Joint Action’ (Journal of Applied Philosophy), ’The Irrelevance of Coercion, Imposition and Framing to Distributive Justice’(Philosophy & Public Affairs) and ‘Solidarity in the European Union’ (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies).
Research interests: Justice and solidarity in the European Union, freedom of movement and immigration, international justice and the philosophy of international law; human rights and the idea of dignity; the relation between principles and social practices; and moral and social equality. Contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy.