About the Authors of Citizens and Aliens:

Horst Mewes

HORST MEWES  was born near Hamburg, Germany. He is a member of the department of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1970 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, did undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Hamburg. He attended the University of Heidelberg as a Humboldt Fellow. Between 1979 and 1994 Horst Mewes has taught regularly as a visiting professor at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He is a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal since 2008.

Horst Mewes is co-founder, with Paulo Zagalo e Melo, of "Future CItizenship".

In the spirit of Benjamin Constant, Horst Mewes specializes  in the modern problems of citizenship, especially of harmonizing private and public freedoms. Recent emphasis has been on political action theories (like Hannah Arendt) and theories of practical reasoning, both classic and modern (ranging from Aristotle to Leo Strauss and Habermas).  Professor Mewes has published both in German and English, including a book on American political thought and politics (in German), and articles and book chapters on liberalism, citizenship, and the German environmental movement.

Selected publications:
Mewes, Horst. Hannah Arendt's Political Humanism. 2010. Peter Lang Publishing Group.

Kielmansegg, Peter G., Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, editors. 1995. Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II. Cambridge University Press.

Mewes, Horst. Das Politische System der USA, Universitaet-Taschenbuch Verlag, UTB, Second -Edition 1994

Paulo Zagalo e Melo

PAULO ZAGALO E MELO was born in Lisbon, Portugal.
He has been Director of the Luso-American Foundation since September 2006.


Previously, he was with the Fulbright Portugal (the Luso-American Fulbright Commission) since 1993 where he held the positions of Administrative Officer (1993-1996), Acting Executive Director (1996), and Executive Director (1997- 2006). During his tenure as Executive Director, he also served on the Executive Committee of Fulbright Directors from Europe and Israel, a peer-elected position, for three consecutive terms (1998-2003). Prior to Fulbright, Zagalo e Melo was Senior Accountant at Ernst & Young (1991-1993).

Paulo Zagalo e Melo is co-founder, with Horst Mewes, of "Future Citizenship".

Paulo Zagalo e Melo holds a Master in Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University (2004). His academic background also includes undergraduate degrees in Accounting, and in Business Administration. While at Harvard, he was a grantee of the Luso-American Foundation. 

Presently, he is a PhD student in Political Science at the Institute of Political Studies of the Catholic University of Portugal, where he is working on various projects on citizenship.

He has lectured on ‘Portuguese History and Culture’ at the University of Arkansas (1997 and 1998), and on ‘Management of Culture’ at the Catholic University of Portugal (2004).

He was Editor of Fulbright Brainstorms on
Bioethics: Frontiers and New Challenges, Principia, 2006, and has written book reviews for Nova Cidadania, a Portuguese journal of political studies. 

Since 2006, he is also a Member of the Advisory Board of the LL.M. (Master of Laws) in International Trade and Business Law of the Catholic University of Portugal.

Paulo Zagalo e Melo was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Political Science of the University of  Colorado at Boulder during 2008/2009, writing a dissertation on the topic of citizenship and migration in the EU.