Bio

After having completed my German civilian service in northeastern Brazil in 2002/3, I studied philosophy, economics and political science at the universities of Bayreuth, São Paulo and Bern, as well as at Duke. In 2008 I started my PhD in philosophy at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, where I was as a research and teaching fellow of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” and of the Centre for Advanced Study “Justitia Amplificata: Rethinking Justice – Applied and Global.” In 2011 I spent a research stay at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. In 2012 I defended my thesis Global Justice and Development, which was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

Subsequently I began my habilitation thesis in philosophy on the topic of democratic education and worked as postdoctoral research and teaching fellow of Prof. R. Forst’s Leibniz-prize research group in Frankfurt, the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto in 2014/15, and the Hoover Chair for Economic and Social Ethics at the Catholic University of Louvain in 2017. In 2013 and 2017 I have received grants from the German Research Association (DFG) to re-launch the journal Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, which I co-edited from 2012 to 2021. In 2018 I submitted my thesis at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, which was published with Routledge as Democratic Education in a Globalized World in 2019.

In 2018 I began working at the American University of Paris (AUP), where I am Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory in the Department of History and Politics. At AUP I teach both historically and systematically oriented courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and comparative political theory. I was the Coordinator of AUP’s Philosophy Program from 2019 to 2024 and in 2026, before becoming the Director of AUP’s Master’s Programs in Political Science – the Master in International Affairs and the Master in Diplomacy and International Law.

I have been a Fellow of AUP’s Center for Critical Democracy Studies since 2020, book series editor of Philosophy of Education – Debates and Constellations (Brill and Mentis) since 2021, journal editor of Analyse & Kritik – Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory (De Gruyter) since 2022, and convener of the Atelier de Théorie Politique Paris since 2023. Finally, I co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education (CUP) in 2023, I was visiting professor at the University of Graz in 2024, I co-founded the European Seminars in Philosophy of Education in 2025, and I was Humboldt fellow at FU Berlin in 2025 and 2026.