How do heads of governments in liberal democracies exercise political leadership? And why they do it in the manner they do? These questions are at the centre of my current research and which I explore for the post-1945 era. During this period, heads of government were often highly visible figures, but also operated within distinct confines and faced particular challenges, including coalition governments, declining significance of political parties, expansion of the welfare state and subsequent decline of its capacities, supranational integration and a fundamental transformation of the media landscape through the ascent of television and internet. These circumstances limited their room for manoeuvre they had, but, paradoxically, at crucial moments, such as crises, also enabled them to play a critical role. 

As a historian of modern Europe in general and modern Germany in particular, I research this problem in my current book project, which will be a new history of Germany’s so-called Kanzlerdemokratie from Konrad Adenauer to Olaf Scholz. This book, which will be my second single-authored academic monograph, will move beyond political science’s focus on specific styles of leadership and the historical discipline’s interest in individual chancellors. Instead, it will provide a new historical understanding of how democratic political leadership is exercised in the postwar era. Closely aligned with this research project is an edited volume which I am preparing together with Beatrice de Graaf on how institutions in modern German history have responded in and to crises and which will be published by Bloomsbury. Both research projects are distinctly historical, but they also speak to our present situation: how can and should institutions respond in and to crises? And what role is there for political leadership in upholding liberal democracy?

These research projects build on my previous work, which has explored how political authority in nineteenth-century German history was staged and how Europe’s imperial monarchies modernized their polity. My first monograph, Wilhelm I as German Emperor: Staging the Kaiser (2024) was published with Palgrave and demonstrated how the first Kaiser used active self-staging in a range of spatial, temporal and medial contexts to establish the imperial role at the had of the new national polity and set the precedent for his successors of what this role entailed. Specific aspects of this research project, which was based on my PhD in German studies that I undertook at the University of Warwick, have been published in several edited volumes, as well as the journal German History. Together with Heidi Hein-Kircher, I have edited the volume Modernizing Europe’s Imperial Monarchies: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the Nineteenth Century, which was published by Palgrave in 2025. As a political historian, I draw in all of my research and teaching on my distinct interdisciplinary background in education, (military) history and German studies.