From 27 to 30 October, the fourth edition of the interdisciplinary Villa Vigoni Autumn School took place at Lake Como in Italy. The conference was attended by master's and doctoral students from Bucerius Law School, Hamburg University, and the universities of Flensburg, Bologna, Bocconi (Milan), Salento, Fudan in Shanghai and Johns Hopkins in Nanjing. Once again, the event was co-organised by Prof. Glassmann acting on part of Europa-Universität Flensburg. His lecture was entitled: “Europe's Role in an Era of Weaponized Interdependence in the Global Economy”. This year's Autumn School focused on the topic of 'Europe in the Age of Global Power Politics: The Future of Normative Power, Civil Power, Soft Power'. The 47 participants were welcomed by the General Secretary of the Villa Vigoni, Christiane Liermann Traniello, among others. Over the course of several days, lecturers from the participating universities delivered presentations on European power politics from political and economic perspectives, as well as legal and historical angles. Students from all participating universities in Germany, Italy and China worked together in groups to reflect on what they had learnt, delivering their own presentations on the last day of the event. The photo shows the four students from the Autumn School together with Ulrich Glassmann: Gwenael Leclerc, Rebecca Heuer, Thea Kruse and Paul Bringmann.

In July 2026 Prof. Glassmann visited the University of Bologna to advance a research project on bilateral relations between Germany and Italy. Together with his colleague Prof. Gianfranco Baldini from the University of Bologna, he drew up a research agenda for the coming months, which is intended to lead to a joint publication.

Former army general Roberto Vannacci has founded a new radical right-wing party in Italy that resembles the German AfD in many respects. Ulrich Glassmann talks on the Deutschlandfunk programme ‘Europa heute’ about the extent to which the new party threatens the current governing coalition and how it could change the political landscape in Italy. You can listen to the podcast 
here.

In early January 2026, former doctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Comparative Political Economy, Douglas Nunes, successfully defended his dissertation on Higher Education in Europe's Knowledge Economies. We would like to congratulate Douglas on this achievement! His thesis is out now! (see link below) About the book: “This study explores the influence of stakeholders on higher education policy within the context of the knowledge economy. More precisely, it examines the influence of employers' associations, universities, and regional and national political authorities on higher education policy in the cases of Ireland and Spain. Drawing from the literature on Growth Models (GM), the study employs a combination of content analysis of 31 semi-structured expert interviews, descriptive statistics, and analyses of official documents from regional and national stakeholders. The analysis identifies the existence of two intertwined underlying conditions as central to the ability of specific stakeholders to influence higher education policy: the characteristics of labour markets and the governance structure of higher education systems. The findings demonstrate that national stakeholders exert a greater influence in centralised higher education systems, while regional stakeholders have a more significant impact in decentralised higher education systems."
https://link.springer.com/book/9783658510015