Faculty Profile for Dr. Franziska Newell

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Franziska Boehme Newell joined Texas State University the fall 2019 semester as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching concentrate on international law and human rights with a substantive focus on international criminal law, international courts, and memory politics. Her book, State Behavior and the International Criminal Court: Between Resistance and Cooperation (Routledge 2022), charts compliance and resistance to the ICC as a continuum and seeks to explain these state behaviors as well as the Court’s response to them. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining European states' approaches to the restitution of colonial-era plundered heritage in their national museums.

Dr. Boehme Newell's research has been supported through a Small Research Grant from the American Political Science Association, a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation and a research grant from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Global Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Human Rights, The Journal of Human Rights, and the Journal of International Organizations Studies.

Born and raised in Germany, Dr. Boehme Newell completed her Bachelor of Arts in Intercultural European and American Studies at Martin Luther University and her Master of Arts in American Studies at the University of Leipzig. In 2011 she moved to Syracuse, NY where she earned her second Master of Arts degree in Political Science and in 2017 she completed her Ph.D. Prior to joining Texas State, she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Teaching Interests

At Texas State, she teaches classes on human rights, international law and international organizations. She also teaches the Senior Seminar in political science and international studies.

Research Interests

Dr. Boehme Newell's scholarship addresses an important question in international politics: Why and how do states support or contest global justice institutions and norms? Her research focuses mainly on two forms of transitional justice, meaning how states try to overcome legacies of past human rights violations: 1. International criminal justice and the work of international courts, and 2. Non-legal justice by former European imperial powers such as apologies or the return of colonial looted heritage.