Vivien A. Schmidt Session Overview

Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Professor Emerita of International Relations and Political Science, and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe, all at Boston University, where she taught from 1998 to 2023. Prof. Schmidt is currently Visiting Fellow in the Robert Schuman Center at the European University Institute in Florence, Honorary Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, and Senior Fellow at the Zoe Institute in Cologne and Brussels.  She received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, her Masters and PhD from the University of Chicago, and attended Sciences Po in Paris. Prof. Schmidt’s research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory—in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). Her recent books include Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy (2020—recipient of the Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, Politics section and Honorable Mention from the European Union Studies Association); Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-edited, 2013), and Democracy in Europe (2006— named in 2015 by the European Parliament as one of the ‘100 Books on Europe to Remember’). Her awards and fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Mentoring Award of the Women in International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association, the Belgian Franqui Interuniversity Chair for foreign scholars, a Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency, a Jean Monnet Chair awarded by the European Union Commission, and Fulbright Fellowships to France and the UK. Her honors include being decorated as a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and granted an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels (ULB). Prof. Schmidt has also been a visiting professor or visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin, the Free University of Brussels, Sciences Po in Paris, the European University Institute, and Oxford University, among others. She is past head of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) and sits on a number of advisory boards, including, the Vienna Institute for Peace, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (Brussels), and previously the Wissenschaft Zentrum Berlin. She has published thirteen books, over 300 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, focuses on the ‘rhetoric of discontent,’ through a transatlantic investigation of the populist revolt against globalization and Europeanization.