Barbara Zehnpfennig

Barbara Zehnpfennig is a German political scientist. She studied philosophy, sociology, German studies and history in Berlin and received her doctorate in 1983 with a dissertation on Plato and Fichte. In 1999, she completed her habilitation at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg with a study of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. She taught at Freie Universität Berlin, the Berlin University of the Arts and Helmut Schmidt University before taking up a professorship in political theory and the history of ideas at the University of Passau, where she taught until 2022. Her research has focused on ancient philosophy, American constitutional thought, totalitarianism and National Socialism. In 2017, Zehnpfennig became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.