Jan Christoph Suntrup studied Political Science, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Heidelberg and Sciences Po Lille. In 2010, he obtained his doctoral degree, summa cum laude, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His thesis on the transforming role of intellectuals in France was supported by a scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Afterwards, he worked for a decade as a researcher, Research Coordinator and fellow at the interdisciplinary Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” at the University of Bonn, where he completed, in 2017, his habilitation with a thesis on various dimensions of legal conflicts from the perspective of political culture research. In 2019, he was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (European Institute) and Sciences Po Law School Paris and Research Fellow of the Institut historique allemand in Paris. Moreover, since 2009, he regularly taught courses, predominantly in political theory, at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of LMU and later at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn. Since April 2020, he is Acting Professor of Cultural Theory at the Universität der Bundeswehr München.

Research Interests

• Political Theory and Philosophy, History of Political Thought
• Theories of Democracy and Contemporary Problems and Challenges of Democratic Orders
• Theories of Culture and Methods of Cultural Research
• Cultural Analysis of Politics and Law
• Legal Pluralism, Constitutions and Processes of Constitutionalization on the National, Transnational and International level, Authoritarian Constitutionalism
• States of Exception
• Intellectuals
• Political System and Culture of France

Current Research Projects

Currently, Jan Christoph Suntrup works on a book about the temporality, topology, symbolic forms and sovereignty effects of states of exception and emergency politics.

Jan Christoph Suntrup is co-editing an issue on the temporality of states of exception and emergency politics for the Zeitschrift für politische Theorie.

Publications (selection)

Dynamics of Constitutional Cultures. The Cultural Manifestation and Political Force Field of Constitutionalism, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2021.

Between Prerogative Power and Legality – Reading Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State as an Analytic Tool for Present Authoritarian Rule, in: Jurisprudence. An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought 11/3 (2020), pp. 335–359.

Umkämpftes Recht. Zur mehrdimensionalen Analyse rechtskultureller Konflikte durch die politische Kulturforschung, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2018 (600 S.)