Professor Katrin Kinzelbach is a political scientist and one of the academic directors of FAU’s M.A. Human Rights. She teaches the MA’s foundational political science course, specialization seminars on varying topics, and also co-teaches the course on research methods. Her own research interests focus on human rights diplomacy, academic freedom violations worldwide, and human rights data.

Before joining FAU in 2019, Katrin was associate director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a foreign policy think tank in Berlin. During that time, she was also a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest, where she taught at the School of Public Policy and headed a practice-oriented human rights clinic for several years. Prior to that, she lived and researched in the People’s Republic of China. Previously still, she was a research associate at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights in Vienna, Austria. Outside of think tanks and academia, Katrin has also worked for the United Nations Development Programme at several duty stations between 2001 and 2007. She has consulted for the European Commission and for the German development organisation GIZ, among others.

In an honorary capacity, Katrin has served, among other positions, on the German Federal Government’s Advisory Council on Civilian Crisis Prevention (2015-2018), on the North-South Advisory Board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (2018-2021), and on the Academic Freedom Committee of the International Studies Association (2021-2024).