Dr Uta Staiger

Uta Staiger is Associate Professor of European Studies and Director of the UCL European Institute, a European Commission designated Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. Since 2010, she has led the Institute in its mission to develop and support UCL research and teaching activities on Europe across faculties, advise UCL leadership on European matters, and maximise the reach and impact of UCL expertise beyond the university.

In 2017, she was appointed as Pro-Vice-Provost (Europe), a strategic position shaping UCL’s engagement with European higher education partners and policy. In this role, she contributed to UCL's Brexit mitigation planning and co-convened the university's steering group on the research-based response to Brexit. She also worked on UCL’s institutional responses to the Russia-Ukraine war. Uta is now UCL’s Global Strategic Academic Advisor on Europe, working with the Vice-Provost for Research, Innovation and Global Engagement.

Uta’s research sits at the intersection of modern European thought, culture, and politics. Her interests include political action, crisis, and stasis in liberal democracies; Hannah Arendt, emotions, and political virtuosity; performance, particularly tragedy and its reinventions, in aesthetic and political thought; and the spaces, places, and architectures of politics. She has also published and taught on the history and theory of European integration, and all matters Brexit, most recently a special issue of Global Policy (Brexit: Past, Present and Future, April 2022), work on the cultural sources of British hard bargaining (JCMS 2021) and the open-access edited volume Brexit and Beyond: The Future(s) of Europe (UCL Press 2018).

Educated at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Girona and Konstanz, Uta is fluent in five languages and currently teaches across three faculties. She is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. She sat on the Russell Group EU Advisory Group and the board of the Scottish Council of Foreign Relations.