Leuphana raises its Profile with new School of Public Affairs
2022-03-11 Lüneburg. With its new School of Public Affairs, Leuphana University Lüneburg is setting a new focus in research and teaching, raising its profile as a university with a strong orientation towards the humanities and social sciences. The school combines the disciplines of political science, law, and economics, thus creating a unique profile to address issues at the interface of politics, economics, and society in Germany. 26 professorships will be located in the new school. It will commence its work on 1 April 2022.
"The new school will focus its research on the major transformations of our time and continue to develop the existing research priorities on the future of democracy, evidence-based political decisions, and law in the context of social transformation," explains University President Sascha Spoun. Especially against the backdrop of the recent upheavals in politics and society, it was important to take a cross-disciplinary look at the relationship between the state, democracy and the market economy and to bring it to bear in research and teaching.
The participating disciplines have already identified many intersections between their subject areas in the past, and now, with the founding of the school, they seek to strengthen the interdisciplinary treatment of topics. The role of the state as a decisive actor in overcoming our contemporary crises is to be at the centre of attention. Research and teaching are to be linked in a very special way in order to be able to approach the phenomenon of the state in all its complexity.
The research agenda of the new school includes questions of democratic theory as well as the economic analysis of political decisions and the decisions of companies and institutions. The jurisprudential perspective will focus in particular on the europeanisation and internationalisation of the legal system and on the question of what role law plays in the age of social transformation.
In addition to joint research projects, joint study programmes and academic events are also expected to shape the cooperation between the disciplines in the school in the future. Furthermore, the implementation of numerous international cooperations is planned. This includes setting up joint master's programmes with European partner universities, among them the University of Glasgow. In the Political Science section, a double bachelor's programme is planned with the Université Paris-Est.
In the course of founding the school, no less than 11 professorships will be filled. Three of these professorships are in political science, seven in law and one in economics. The corresponding calls for applications are already underway. There is a great deal of interest among applicants.
Further information:
www.leuphana.de/en/institutions/faculty/school-of-public-affairs.html