Rebecca Pates - Biography#

Rebecca Pates studied Philosophy at the Universities of Oxford (UK) and McGill (Montreal, Canada). She has been at Leipzig University’s Political Science Department since 2001, where she has been successful in successive grant applications to the German Research Foundation, the EU 6th and 7th Frameworks and the Germany Ministry of Education and Research on a number of issues, altogether accumulating grants to the tune of €1,3 Mill.. These research projects were often comparative projects with some of Germany’s neighbouring countries, involving colleagues from Poland, Czechia, France and Sweden. The research questions, and her subsequent publications range from identity politics, state classification practices, trafficking in human beings and nationalisms. She is introducing a state ethnographic approach to the German Political Science perspective, using a range of cases in order to focus on understanding what is called “the state”.