About

I am a sociologist working in sociology of science and higher education research and at the crossroads of the sociologies of knowledge, culture, and inequality. I am a Juniorprofessor for higher education research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

My research facilitates historical and contemporary perspectives on various topics like academic disciplines and careers, evaluation and competition, power and social inequality, and subjectivity and performativity.

Currently I am principal investigator of two research projects, both funded by the German Research Foundation: one is concerned with academic socialization at the the post-doc stage (with Kathia Serrano Velarde), the other with how notions of “risk” are mobilized when risky research is proposed and assessed in funding programs dedicated to risky research.

I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2014, 2015, and 2016 at the Centre of Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University, Boston, and at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2018, I was principal investigator of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn. From 2018 to 2021, I was a postdoc at the Leibniz Center for Science and Society at the Leibniz University Hannover.

My recent research has appeared in Research Evaluation, Social Studies of Science, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Higher Education, and Poetics. I am a member of the research networks “Political Sociology of Transnational Fields“, “The Sociology of Sociological Knowledge“, and “On the Way to Valuation Society?“, all funded by the German Research Foundation.

Together with David Kaldewey and Julia Schubert (University of Bonn), I have won the first prize with a contribution to a prize question of the Austrian Academy of Sciences on evaluating the societal relevance of research.