Hannah Bliersbach is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (VVI) as part of the research line 'Resilience & Security' of the NWO-funded project Crafting Resilience.

Per 1 September she will start work for her new research project: Structures of Citizenship Law. Bliersbach was awarded €34.894,00 by the Leiden University Funf (LUF) to compare the implementation of citizenship law in the Netherlands and her native Germany. Structures of Citizenship will expand her doctoral research, which focused on new citizens' experiences of naturalising in Canada and Germany. The new project will center the perspectives of the street-level bureaucrats tasked with putting law into action.

She defended her dissertation "Becoming and Belonging? Lived Experiences of naturalization and the implementation of citizenship law in Germany and Canada" in May 2025. In her PhD research, Hannah connected citizenship studies, public administration literature on street-level bureaucracy and discretion, and socio-legal scholarship concerning crimmigration, procedural justice, and legal consciousness.

Hannah has taught courses on qualitative research methods, socio-legal studies, and street-level bureaucracy in both English and Dutch.

Before joining the VVI as a PhD Candidate, Hannah taught Academic Skills and Statistics at the Political Science Institute at Leiden University. She received her MRes in Political Science and Public Administration from Leiden University (2019) and her BA in Political Science, Sociology & English Studies from the University of Bonn (2017).

Publications