The Trustees of the Europaeum are delighted to announce the appointment of Anthony Teasdale as Executive Director of the Europaeum with effect from 1 July 2024. Anthony was Director-General of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) – the European Parliament’s in-house research service and think tank – from 2013 to 2022, having previously worked as a civil servant and political adviser in Brussels and London.
Anthony will replace Dr Hartmut Mayer, Fellow and Tutor in Politics at St Peter’s College, Oxford, who has directed the Europaeum twice, from 2017 to 2020 and from 2022 to 2024, serving in-between as Executive Chair of the Europaeum from 2020 to 2022. Hartmut is taking up the Steven Muller Chair in German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe, Bologna.
(Lord) Chris Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chair of the Europaeum’s Board of Trustees, said: ‘We are delighted that Anthony is joining us in this key role, as the Europaeum continues to develop as one of Europe’s most active university alliances, especially in the humanities and social sciences. He brings a very wide range of academic and practitioner experience to the job, most recently heading up the largest parliamentary research service in Europe’.
Hartmut Mayer, outgoing Executive Director of the Europaeum, said: ‘Anthony is a great successor, who will build on our recent success in widening and deepening the Europaeum’s membership and activities. We already offer exciting programmes that encourage new skills and new thinking among some of Europe’s most able postgraduate students. Anthony will help take this role to the next level in coming years’.
Dr Andrew Graham, Trustee of the Europaeum and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, said: ‘I would like to thank Hartmut for his enormous contribution to the Europaeum, and congratulate him on his new appointment. His departure potentially created a very large hole. I am therefore thrilled that we have attracted someone with Anthony’s multiple talents and who is such a perfect fit for this position. I anticipate both excitement and pleasure in working with him.’
Anthony Teasdale said: ‘I am looking forward to joining the Europaeum very much. I have admired its work over many years and am strongly committed to its central mission of connecting students across disciplines, cultures and countries. In a fast-moving environment, I will aim both to refine and enhance the Europaeum’s trusted and valued existing services for its 18 member universities, and to develop a range of new ones for the future’.
Notes for editors
The Europaeum
The Europaeum is an association of 18 leading European universities, founded in 1992 by the University of Oxford. These universities have joined forces to ‘give the most talented, most energetic and most socially committed students’ within its network the opportunity to ‘develop professional qualities to shape the future of Europe for the better’.
The Europaeum organises workshops, seminars and policy fora, with a primary focus on study of the humanities and social sciences. The main themes of its current work are (i) European history and culture, (ii) European policy-making, and (iii) liberal democracy and citizen engagement. Its flagship, two-year, policy and leadership ‘Scholars’ Programme’ gives 30 or so of Europe’s most outstanding doctoral students the challenge of working in small multi-disciplinary teams to develop policies that could ‘make Europe a better place’.
The 18 member universities of the Europaeum are: Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra), Berlin (Freie), Bologna, Copenhagen, Geneva (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), Helsinki, Kraków (Jagiellonian), Leiden, KU Leuven, Lisbon (Catholic University of Portugal), Luxembourg, Madrid (Complutense), Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), Oxford, Prague (Karlova), St Andrews in Scotland, Tartu and the Central European University in Vienna.
Anthony Teasdale
Anthony Teasdale was Director-General of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) – the European Parliament’s 300-strong, in-house research service and think tank – from 2013 to 2022, having previously worked as a civil servant and political adviser in Brussels and London.
In Brussels, Teasdale served in the secretariat of the EU Council of Economics and Finance Ministers (Ecofin), in the private office of two Presidents of the European Parliament (Hans-Gert Poettering and Jerzy Buzek), and as head of policy for the EPP Group in the Parliament. In Whitehall, he has been special adviser to a Foreign Secretary (Geoffrey Howe) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and a Chancellor of the Exchequer (Kenneth Clarke) at HM Treasury.
Teasdale is currently a Visiting Professor in Practice at the European Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE) and an Adjunct Professor in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University (SIPA). He is co-author of The Penguin Companion to European Union (2012) and of Europe: The History of a Continent (2023) and is author of several essays and academic articles on European, UK and US history and politics.
Further inquiries
For further details, please contact Dr Andrew Graham, Trustee of the Europaeum, at andrew.graham@balliol.ox.ac.uk.
