Dr Katja Seidel
I am a Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities. I hold a combined BA/MA in History and French from the Universities of Tübingen (Germany) and Aix-en-Provence (France) and have obtained my PhD from the University of Portsmouth. After a two-year spell as a post-doctoral researcher at the German Historical Institute in Paris I joined the University of Westminster in 2011. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
My research is focused on the history of European integration and international organisations more broadly. I am interested in exploring the historical origins and longer-term developments of EU policies as well as the emergence of international administrations such as the High Authority and the European Commission. I am also interested in biographical and prosopographical research, in particular of transnational actors. I am happy to supervise PhD students in any of the above or related areas.
My interest in biographical studies has resulted in numerous research outputs. More recently I have written a chapter on German Christian-Democrats in the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community and Euratom for a book project funded and coordinated by the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation as well as a chapter on actors ensuring continuity between international secretariats, published in the volume Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s (2020).
I am currently working on a biography on Miriam Camps, a US diplomat, economist, author and member of foreign policy think tanks in Britain and the United States.
I am part of the international consortium of historians that wrote the second and third volumes of the official history of the European Commission, funded by the European Commission. Volume II, covering the period 1973-86, was published in 2014, Volume III, covering the years 1986-2000, came out in 2019. The chapters I authored focused on the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, staff in the Commission and the European Public Health Policy.
Finally, I will be able to combine my research interest with my teaching in a textbook on the history of European integration entitled 'Reinventing Europe: The History of the European Union 1945-2020' (co-edited with Dr Brigitte Leucht and Professor Laurent Warlouzet).