Nele Thomann

In 2020, Nele earned her bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg and subsequently pursued her master’s degree in transatlantic studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where she also had the opportunity to participate in a semester-long exchange program at UNC at Chapel Hill.

Local Goes Global: Federalism, Substate Government Authority, and the Foreign Relations of US State (and Local) Governments 

Nele Thomann’s research focuses on the complex dynamics of US substate government authority on both a domestic and an international scale. Through a series of case studies in the venues of environmental and migration policy, she examines the intersections and interconnectedness of contemporary US federalism and the behavior of substate governments, both domestically and internationally, to investigate how and why authority is (re)negotiated, contested, and/or shifted. The complexities her dissertation aims to detangle include, but are not exclusive to, questions relating to the agency of substate governments within the US federal system, degrees of institutionalization of substate government authority, and the impact of partisanship and ideology on the ways in which substate governments are creating and asserting their (moral) authority in specific domestic and international policy venues, shaping an increasingly complex landscape of governance.