Holger Strassheim is a visiting research fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the spring 2014 semester. In his work he explores the changing role of expertise in welfare and risk regulation. His current research is based on a comparison of knowledge orders, focusing on science-policy arrangements in the United States, Great Britain and Germany. While at Harvard, Holger is studying the transformation of regulatory science in employment policy and food safety; he is also writing his second book dealing with political and epistemic authority in contemporary democracies. Other research interests include the global spread of calculative policy practices, discourses on welfare and social security, public management collaborations and the rise of behavioral interventions in public governance.

Holger’s fellowship at Harvard is closely connected to a research project on the “Changing Orders of Political Expertise in Germany, Great Britain and the US“ (SCOPE), funded by the Volkswagen-Foundation and carried out at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, where he works as a principal investigator and co-leader. As visiting professor at the University of Bremen’s Centre for Social Policy Research and as assistant professor at the Humboldt-University Berlin, Holger enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate level classes in social sciences.

Previously, he held the position of visiting professor at the Institute for Political Science, University of Darmstadt. He is currently collaborating with his colleagues from Darmstadt in a research project on “Knowledge Policy and Welfare State Change”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is co-speaker of the working group on Policy, Science and Technology at the German Political Science Association, aiming at strengthening the ties between the political science and the STS/science policy communities. In 2009 he became visiting fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam. Holger has earned his PhD from the University of Tuebingen where he received the dissertation award 2011 for his research on network politics and knowledge creation in public sector collaborations.