News 2009
3 December 2009: Theseus Prize
Emmanuel Sigalas is awarded the "Theseus Award for Promising Research on European Integration
2009" in Berlin for his research on people mobility and legitimacy in the EU.
This is the 5th honour for EIF researchers or projects within two years: EIoP was included
in the SSCI; LREG received the European information award; Gerda Falkner was given the JCMS best paper
prize (with Oliver Treib); and Emmanuel Sigalas’s PhD thesis now has been honoured for the second
time already.
October 2009: Thematic focus unified
Now all EIF staff, including all doctoral students, work on European integration issues. This was one of the reform goals envisioned by the ÖAW in summer 2007. Mag. Phillip Schnell and Mag. Barbara Herzog-Punzenberger, experts on migration and training issues, moved to the Academy's "Institute for Culture Studies and the History of Theatre" (IKT).
25 August 2009: Best Paper Prize
Gerda Falkner and Oliver Treib are awarded the prize for the best article published in 2008 in the “Journal of Common Market Studies” (considered the most prestigious journal in the field of European integration), for 'Three Worlds of Compliance or Four? The EU-15 Compared to New Member States' in Vol. 46(2) March 2008. According to the 2008 ISI Citation Reports for the Social Sciences Citation Index, the interdisciplinary JCMS is no. 8 of the 99 journals worldwide from the broad field of political science (rank 22 of the 209 economics journals included and no. 6 of 55 in International Relations).
29 June 2009: Annual report 2008
This balance of activities shows that a steep increase in top-quality publications within the Social Sciences Citation Index, as well as in academic speeches and lectures given by its staff, was achieved in the first year after the reform of the EIF.
17 June 2009: Speaker of the Social Sciences Research Centre
EIF’s director Gerda Falkner is elected to be speaker of the Social Sciences Research Centre of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the period 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2010.
11 May 2009: Prize awarded
In London, the EIF’s journal Living Reviews in European Governance (“LREG”, Editor-in-Chief: Gerda Falkner) is selected for the 2009 Awards for European Information Sources by the European Information Association.
April 2009: Public events on the “EU as a crisis manager”
Start of a series of discussions on issues as topical as the EU’s action capacity during the financial and economic turmoil and on security in the EU’s neighbourhood in both the Balkans and the Middle East. EIF researchers present their ongoing work on these topics and discuss with academic experts and practitioners.
12 April 2009: Prize awarded
Emmanuel Sigalas is awarded the „Lord Bryce Prize for the best thesis in the field of international relations and comparative studies” by the Political Studies Association, UK, for his PhD in Political Science on ‘Cross-border People Mobility and EU Legitimacy: The Effect of ERASMUS on European Identity and EU Support’.
March 2009: Gerda Falkner member of the EUI’s Research Council
At the end of last year, the European University Institute set up a new Research Council made up of external academics, which advises the Institute on the research profile and activities of its departments and centres. The EUI in Florence is was set up in 1972 by the six founding Member States of the European Communities to provide advanced academic training to PhD students and to promote research at the highest level. It carries out research in a European perspective (basic research, comparative research and Community research) in history, law, economics, political and social science.
Gerda Falkner also serves on the External Scientific Advisory Boards of the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, WZB) and the Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin.
6-7 February 2009: Workshop on EU Policies in Central Eastern Europe
Scholars from a number of European countries participated in this workshop at the EIF, directed by Gerda Falkner. Now that the lever of membership incentives is gone, how well do the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe perform when it comes to turning the law into living rights? What are the problems accounting for “dead letters”? How speedy can structural reform barriers, most importantly in the administrations, court systems and labour inspectorates, be mended?
On the basis of the Vienna Workshop, the paper givers (inter alia, from the ETH Zurich, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Leiden and Konstanz Universities) will jointly submit a Special Issue to an international refereed SSCI journal.
January and February 2009: Fresh research initiatives
In early 2009, a number of fresh projects have been taken up, and other topics have been strengthened, within the EIF’s research programme.
Maybe the most topical one in these days of the world’s financial crisis is a study of the EU’s financial market policy. Zdenek Kudrna will not only look into the (non-)activities of the EU but also into how the EU performs as an actor on the global scheme. Kudrna studied in the Czech Republic and at the Central European University in Budapest before joining the EIF.
In the field of European defence policy, European integration performance and resulting Europeanisation effects in Germany and Poland will be analysed by Laura Chappell, who received her PhD from the University of Birmingham. The foreign policy of the EU, particularly vis-à-vis the Middle East region, will be studied in-depth by Patrick Müller. Before joining the EIF, he was on a Transatlantic Post-Doc Fellowship for International Relations and Security (TAPIR) with postings in Berlin (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) and Paris (Institut francais de relations internationales).
With a project on representative claims in the EP elections 2009, the EIF is now a member of the RECON consortium, an Integrated Project supported by the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for Research coordinated by ARENA, the Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. 19 other partner institutions and around 70 participating researchers cooperate across Europe. The EIF team is led by Doz. Johannes Pollak and an additional researcher has been employed: Emmanuel Sigalas is of Greek origin and studied in the UK (MA University of Essex, PhD University of Reading). His research focuses on cross-border people mobility in the EU and on issues of EU representation.
January 2009: A further Journal is now edited at EIF
The “European Integration online Papers” (EIoP) will in the future be edited at the EIF. Gerda Falkner, EIF’s Director, is the political science editor of this journal which has just been included in the Social Science Citation Index, the list of leading refereed journals worldwide.
