Uta Staiger

Executive Director, UCL European Institute, UCL

Uta Staiger joined UCL in 2009. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, gained with a scholarship from the Gates Cambridge Trust, as well as an MPhil from the same institution. She was also educated at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Konstanz (Germany). Prior to joining UCL, she held a post-doctoral position at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Previously, she worked at a private foundation dedicated to cultural policy research in Barcelona, and was coordinator of a number of European Commission funded cooperative research projects.

As the Executive Director of the UCL European Institute, Uta develops the long-term strategy for the Institute, and devises and implements its work programme. She also teaches on the history and theory of European integration for the UCL Department of History.

Uta’s main research interests, spanning 20th century European thought, history and EU politics, are broadly in the relationship between culture and politics. She is interested in modern European, particularly early to mid-20th-century German thought that seeks to straddle aesthetics and the idea of the political. She has also worked on the role culture plays for citizenship and democracy, both in political thought and in policy developments over the course of European integration. She has published on the conjunction of culture and citizenship in European policy discourse, and the role of cultural practices for public discourses on contested urban sites. The latter also led to a co-edited volume, Memory Culture and the Contemporary City (Palgrave 2009). Most recently, she wrote a chapter on the historical policy context for the European Capitals of Culture programme for Patel, K. (ed.) The Cultural Politics of Europe. European Capitals of Culture and European Union since the 1980s (Routledge 2012). She has also contributed to and co-edited several policy reports for the European Commission, most recently writing the national report for Germany for the study Access of Young People to Culture for the DG Education and Culture (2010).

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in 2012.