Lisa Harms

Lisa Harms was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Comparative Constitutionalism from October 2019 to July 2020.

Lisa holds a Master’s degree in Political Sociology from the Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP) Paris. She has completed her PhD in Sociology and Political Science at the University of Göttingen and the IEP Paris. During her PhD, she was as a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Fellow Group Governance of Cultural Diversity. Her PhD included extended research stays at the Centre d’Études Relations Internationales in Paris. Before joining the AvH Chair of Comparative Constitutionalism, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the MPI Department Ethics, Law, and Politics.

Lisa’s research is situated at the crossroads of Political Sociology, the Sociology of Law and the Sociology of Religion. Currently, she is interested in the role of conservative legal mobilisation and litigation in the expansion and contestation of liberal constitutionalism. She studies the formation of legal elite networks and their implication in transnational judicial politics. In her doctoral dissertation, Lisa has studied faith-based litigation at the European Court of Human Rights. She is also involved in quantitative research projects on transnational judicial developments regarding religious freedom and freedom of speech, led respectively by the Max Planck Fellow Group Governance of Cultural Diversity and the Maxwell Syracuse University. Previously, Lisa has worked on socio-legal and political dynamics of religion in prison.