Short Curriculum Vitae

Since December 2013, Tobias Lenz is the Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) of Global Governance and Comparative Regionalism at the Department of Political Science in cooperation with the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg.

He holds a Bachelor in European Studies from the University of Osnabrück, as well as a M.Phil in Politics and a D.Phil in International Relations, both from Oxford University, UK. During his doctoral studies, he spent several months as a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin (Research College ‘The Normative Power of Europe’) and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA.

Prior to his appointment in Göttingen and Hamburg, Tobias Lenz was a post-doctoral fellow in a research project on the authority of international organizations, directed by Prof. Liesbet Hooghe and Prof. Gary Marks, at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. During this period, he spent a semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. In the academic year 2015/16, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Tobias Lenz currently conducts two third-party funded research projects. The first one is a Leibniz Junior Research Group on the causes and consequences of legitimation strategies of regional organizations (LegRO), located at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. The second one is a project on the authority of international organizations and the role of institutional overlap, which he pursues at the University of Goettingen in cooperation with Yoram Haftel from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation.



Research interests

  • international organizations
  • comparative regionalism
  • institutional design and evolution
  • legitimacy and legitimation
  • EU foreign policy
  • diffusion