I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and core faculty member of the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. I live in Pearisburg, Virginia.

I was born and raised in Munich, Germany, and earned my M.A. in philosophy and political science from the University of Regensburg in 2005 and my Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2008. I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg on a fixed-term contract from 2009-2015 (which is common for the German academic system). In 2013-2014, I was on leave, visiting the University of Arizona with a scholarship from the German Research Foundation. In 2015, I earned my Habilitation in philosophy from the University of Hamburg and, after two years as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University, I transitioned to the United States in 2017. I held positions at Chapman University in California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before starting my tenure-track position at Virginia Tech in 2021.

My main research interests are 1) the justification of the practice of private property and its distributional implications; 2) the nature and justification of political authority and state legitimacy; and 3) political morality beyond justice, in particular the morality of making compromises in politics and the ideal of public justifiability. I won the 2017 Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy for my paper "Rescuing Public Justification from Public Reason Liberalism".

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My email is [email protected], and I'm on academia, philpeople, google scholar, facebook, and instagram. Don't hesitate to get in touch!

You can download my C.V. from my academia page.

Since 2015, I've been the co-organizer of the workshop series "Workshop für Politische Philosophie".