Robert Harmsen joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2008 as Professor of Political Science.
He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta (Canada), and then undertook his doctoral work as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Kent at Canterbury (United Kingdom). After defending his doctoral thesis (on the historical and intellectual origins of the constitution of the French Fifth Republic) in 1988, he returned to Canada as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal, subsequently holding teaching positions at McGill and Laurentian Universities.
Crossing the Atlantic again, he joined Queen’s University Belfast in 1993, as a founding member of the Institute of European Studies. During his time at Queen’s, Dr. Harmsen served as the initial co-ordinator of the university’s MA programme in European Integration and Public Policy. He also held a number of key administrative posts, including those of Acting Director of the Institute of European Studies, Head of Teaching in the School of Politics and International Studies, and Director of Research for the European Governance and Gender Group in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy.
Professor Harmsen has been a visiting professor at the Institut d’Etudes politiques de Strasbourg (recurring, 1998-2010) and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia (2015-16), as well as a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Humanities of the University Amsterdam (2005) and Researcher-in-Residence at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (2002).
Professor Harmsen’s research interests have spanned a broad range of topics concerned with the contemporary processes of European integration, at both the national and the supranational levels. He has written on the constitutional development of the European Union (including logics of ‘variable geometry’) and on the politico-legal dynamics of the European Human Rights regime (with particular reference to the post-enlargement challenges faced by the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights). He has also published extensively on the themes of ‘Europeanisation’ (notably examining the ‘path dependent’ logics of administrative adaptation to the EU decision-making process) and ‘Euroscepticism’ (specifically in relation to developments in Britain, France, and the Netherlands). A further strand of his research has concerned comparative and international higher education policy (including the Bologna Process), developed through the successfully completed ‘Euro-Uni’ and ‘Global-Uni’ research projects undertaken together with Dr. Gangolf Braband.
In addition to his role as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Professor Harmsen is also the current holder of the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights. He had previously served as the Head of the Department of Social Sciences and as the Director of the Master in European Governance. His current research focuses on the dynamics of judicial globalisation in relation to the diffusion of fundamental rights, as well as on the role of human rights in the policy process.
