Academic Profile

Dr Jasper Theodor Kauth is a comparative political scientist focusing on migration politics, state theory, illiberalism, and American Political Development. In his mixed-methods research, Jasper investigates persistent patterns of exclusion in the political development of liberal democracies, particularly the US. His DPhil thesis, Migration Control and State Power, shows how efforts to control internal and external migration in the 19th and 20th centuries produced similar trajectories of modern state development in the US, UK, and Germany. Drawing on his work on illiberalism, Jasper is now developing a book manuscript on the evolution of migration politics in the US and Europe since 1990 and its implications for democratic practice.

Jasper has been teaching US Politics, comparative politics, and qualitative methods to undergraduates and postgraduates across Oxford since 2021. He teaches Democracy in Theory and Practice as part of the RAI-Kinder Summer School, a collaboration between the RAI and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. In 2022, he became an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Jasper holds a DPhil in Politics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Nuffield College, and an MSc in Politics Research from the University of Oxford. He received his BA in History and Political Science from Heidelberg University, Germany.

Before joining the RAI in 2026, Jasper was a Case Writer at the Blavatnik School of Government’s Case Centre on Public Leadership (Oxford), where he developed case studies on enduring policy challenges worldwide. In 2022, he was on an ESRC Overseas Institutional Visit at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Jasper previously worked in public history and served with Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.