Viktoria Hügel

Viktoria Huegel, BA (Heidelberg University), MA and PhD (University of Brighton) with the dissertation “From Authority to Authoritarianism and back again": Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt” (supervisors: Mark Devenney, Clare Woodford; examiners: Bonnie Honig, German Primera Villamizar). 2022-2023 research assistant at the Institute for Political Science, Heidelberg University. 2018-2022 school tutor in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, Sussex University; 2019 visiting researcher at the Rhetorics department, UC Berkeley.

Since October 2023, I am a post-doctoral researcher in the subproject “Culture – Pre-enacting Democratic Spaces” of the ERC project “Prefiguring Democratic Futures. Cultural and Theoretical Responses to the Crisis of Political Imagination (PI: Oliver Marchart). The aim is to investigate how activists reclaim the physical and symbolic space of the theatre in order to experiment with democratic forms of self-organisation and to open an artistic space of imagination. Together with Dr. Clare Woodford (University of Brighton), I also lead the AHRC research network “Wellbeing State” bringing together international researchers and policy makers to imagine and actualise welfare state politics for the 21st century.

My expertise lies in radical democratic theory and German Political Thought of the 20th century. My first book “From Authority to Authoritarianism and back again” develops a post-foundational concept of authority to defend democratic institutions and procedures against their undermining by new authoritarian politics. For that, it critically examines the concept of authority in the work of Weber, Schmitt, Arendt drawing on post-structuralism, Black radicalism and the philosophy of translation.