Hanne-Margret Birckenbach holds the Jean-Monnet Chair for European Integration at the Institute of Political Science of the Justus-Liebig University in Gießen, Germany. She is a senior researcher at the Schleswig-Holstein Institute for Peace Research (SHIP) at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. Dr. Birckenbach is a leading researcher in European Studies, Human Rights, and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Prof. Birckenbach has a studied Philosophy and German Studies at the University of Tübingen and a then Sociology, minoring in Political Science, Pedagogy and Social Psychology at the University of Frankfurt am Main. She received her doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin and completed her habilitation at the University of Bielefeld's Department of Sociology.