Rasmus Harsbo, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Scholarly Research Communication Group. As a recipient of the Carlsberg Foundation’s Internationalisation fellowship, he is undertaking his research project “Negotiating Neo-nationalist University Imaginaries and Geopolitical Class Cleavages in Denmark and Poland”. Additionally, he is engaged in collaboration with the Policy Futures research network at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University.

Harsbo defended his doctoral dissertation, “Geographies of Emancipation: Neo-Nationalism, Academic Freedom and Higher Education Governance in Poland”, at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, in 2025. The dissertation is based on research that was carried out as part of the comparative research project “Asserting the Nation” led by Associate Professor Katja Brøgger.

Research interests: higher education and research policy, nationalism, academic freedom, Polish university politics, geopolitics, sociology of science.

Publications:

Harsbo, R., & Brøgger, K. (2025, forthcoming in accepted special issue). Temporal entanglements of the collegial, neo-liberal, and illiberal university in contemporary higher education: The university as a microcosm of current conflicting political ideas in Europe. European Journal of Higher Education.

Brøgger, K., Moscovitz, H., Harsbo, R., & Zangrandi, E. (2025, forthcoming). A topological comparative approach: studying the impact of new nationalisms across different higher education policy sites. Higher Education.

Zangrandi, E., & Harsbo, R. (2026, accepted). “Chapter 8: Crusading Against an ‘Immoral Academy’: The State, Universities, and the National Fantasy.” In World Yearbook of Education 2026: The Changing Geopolitics of Higher Education and Research – University Futures Reimagined (Eds. K. Brøgger, J. Lee, S. Robertson, & H. Moscovitz). Routledge.