Dr Jens Boysen studied history, Slavic philology and political science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Magister Artium 1997), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (ERASMUS), the College of Europe in Warsaw-Natolin (Master of Arts 1998) and Eberhard Karls University Tübingen (PhD in Modern History 2008). He has worked as research assistant at the College of Europe in Bruges (1999-2000), DAAD project coordinator at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig (2002-03), research fellow in East Slavic cultural history at Leipzig University (2002-2007) as well as research fellow at the Fraunhofer Centre for Central and Eastern Europe MOEZ (2007-10). In the context of his postdoctoral research, he has worked as research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw (2010-16), lecturer in International Relations and European Studies at Łazarski University Warsaw (2010-15) and research fellow at the Institute for European History of the Technical University in Chemnitz (2017).

Main research interests: history of political ideas and ideologies (nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism); civil-military relations and security policy from the 18th century to the present; German history and German-Polish relations; European integration, especially common foreign and security policy

Selected publications: Preußische Armee und polnische Minderheit. Royalistische Streitkräfte im Kontext der Nationalitätenfrage des 19. Jahrhunderts (1815-1914) [Prussian army and Polish minority. Royalist armed forces and the nationality question in the 19th century (1815-1914), PhD dissertation], Marburg 2008; Cold War military elites between transnational normative communities and national narratives: the case of the two Germanys and Poland, in: Ann-Marie Ekengren, Rasmus Mariager and Poul Villaume (eds.), Northern Europe in the Cold War: East-West Interactions of Security, Culture, and Technology, Helsinki 2015, pp. 130-157; Simultaneity of the un-simultaneous: German social revolution and Polish national revolution in the Prussian east 1918/19, in: Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds.), Germany 1916–23. A Revolution in Context, Bielefeld-New York 2015, pp. 229-250; Not quite “Brothers in arms” – East Germany and People’s Poland between Mutual Dependency and Mutual Distrust, 1975–1990, in: “Trust, but Verify”: The Politics of Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Cold War Order, 1969–1991, ed. by Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis and Christian Ostermann, Stanford-Washington D.C. 2016, pp. 167-197.

Selected research projects: The ideational and sociocultural bases of the Communist armies of East Germany and Poland (postdoc project); The failure of collective security building in Central Europe between the World Wars; Inconsistent change: The Western Powers as enemies of the Weimar Republic; Transnational connections between the Conservative Revolution in Germany and related movements in Europe