Dr. Katrin Kinzelbach

Biography

Katrin Kinzelbach has been a professor at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg since September 2019, holding the Chair in Human Rights Policy. She is also the co-director of the Master program in Human Rights and has been associated with the V-Dem project at the University of Gothenburg. With expertise in the comparative analysis of human rights and their violations, particularly scientific freedom, she explores how various actors construct, codify, implement, or counteract human rights while interacting transnationally. Her interdisciplinary research group focuses on conflict regions and challenges related to human rights violations in consolidated autocracies. Kinzelbach has held visiting professorships at prestigious institutions such as the King’s College London and Central European University and has served as a deputy director at the Global Public Policy Institute. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna, where her doctoral thesis on the EU-China human rights dialogue was awarded the German Study Prize by the Körber Foundation. Her research interests span civil society resistance, academic freedom, and the role of multilateral human rights institutions, underscoring her commitment to empirical human rights research amid significant ethical challenges.

Research Interests

Experience