Former Guest Researchers

Prof. Rogers Brubaker, Ph.D.

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and populism. His most recent books are Grounds for Difference and Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. His current book project is about digital hyperconnectivity and its discontents.

Rogers is staying at the Cluster until 15 December 2020.

Matias Engdal Christensen

Matias Engdal Christensen is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Aarhus University. In his dissertation, he investigates to what extent citizens’ welfare state attitudes are shaped by the information they acquire about the economy through “the slow drip of everyday life”. At the moment, his research interests are mainly but not exclusively related to the causes and consequences of economic inequality perceptions. Hence, one of the central arguments in his dissertation is that economic differences observed in everyday life shape perceptions of economic inequality, which then in turn influences welfare state attitudes. During his time at the cluster, Matias is planning to collaborate with the "Inequality Barometer" Project.

Matias will stayed at the Cluster until mid-July 2022.

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Glassmann

Ulrich Glassmann is professor of Comparative Institutional Analysis with an area focus on Southern Europe, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies at the Europa-University Flensburg, Germany. His research is concerned with institutional regimes governing employment, education and innovation in regional economies. In particular, he focuses on the nexus between family networks and economic performance in Mediterranean countries. In his current project he analyses educational inequalities in authoritarian capitalist systems.

Ulrich will be staying at the Cluster until the end of June 2021.

Walter Haeusl

Walter Haeusl is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence). During his stay, he collaborates with the Research Group The Politics of Labor Market Inequality and Occupational Mobility led by Dr. Thomas Kurer. 

He is interested in the structural foundations of electoral politics in advanced capitalist democracies. His PhD dissertation focuses on the political alignment of precarious workers, delving into employment trajectories and status dynamics.

Walter will be staying at the Cluster until the end of March 2022.

You can reach him by mail or drop by his office.  

Prof. Jan Germen Janmaat

Jan Germen Janmaat is Professor of Political Socialization at the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES), UCL Institute of Education, London. He has published widely on the relation between education, civic values and social cohesion. Among other activities, he has headed a project on the net effect of school-related conditions on civic attitudes, including tolerance, trust and political engagement. Currently, he is working on a Nuffield Foundation funded project about the role that post-16 educational pathways play in enhancing (or mitigating) social inequalities in political engagement. His latest book is "Education, Democracy and Inequality: Political Engagement, and Citizenship Education in Europe" (Palgrave) (co-authored with Bryony Hoskins).

At the Cluster, Jan Germen Janmaat has contributed to the development of research instruments for the project "Students' Perceptions of Inequality and Fairness". Jan German Janmaat stayed at the Cluster until the end of November 2020.

Prof. Chris Koski, Ph.D.

Chris Koski is Professor of Political Science and Dan Greenberg Chair of Environmental Studies at the Department of Political Science, Reed College, Portland, OR. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2007. He was an assistant professor at James Madison University from 2007–2011 and has been at Reed since Fall 2011.

His research interests include theoretical work in public policy theory development, specifically punctuated equilibrium theory and policy design. Substantively, Chris has focused on environmental policy, American state budgeting, and the politics of climate change. His most recent projects include investigations of attitudes toward geoengineering in the United States (with Paul Manson), an investigation of the relationship between attitudes toward climate policy interventions and perceptions of deservedness and power of target populations (with Paul Manson), and variations in policy design of net metering policies in the American states (with Saba Siddiki).  Chris is co-editor (with Peter Steinberger) of the American politics reader, The Real World of American Politics: A Documentary Approach.  

Chris is the current chair of the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy section of the American Political Science Association (until 2023) and is the chair-elect of the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association (beginning August 2022 until August 2023). 

While at the University of Konstanz, Chris worked with Christian Breunig on a project on 'Environmental Inequalities.'

Davy-Kim Lascombes

Davy-Kim Lascombes is a Ph.D candidate in Political Science at the University of Geneva, funded by the Inequality in the Mind  SNF project. He is also an affiliated researcher of the ERC Unequal Democracies research group and shared responsibility for the design and implementation of the Inequality and Politics dataset, a cross-national public opinion survey.

In his research, Davy-Kim studies citizens’ perceptions of inequality and their attitudinal and behavioral implications. His PhD dissertation focuses on fairness evaluations and their effects on individuals’ redistributive preferences and vote choice.

Davy-Kim will be staying at the Cluster until the end of June 2022.

You can reach him by mail.

Prof. Dr. Paul Marx

Paul Marx is Professor of Political Science and Socio-Economics at University of Duisburg-Essen. In addition, he is affiliated to the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies and to the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. His research interests are related to social and political inequality, political behaviour, and comparative welfare state and labour market analysis. He currently works on the politics of taxation and the socio-economic foundations of political integration. In Konstanz, he collaborated with the research project “Digitalization, Automation and the Future of Work in Post-industrial Welfare States”. He recently published a co-edited volume on this topic with (Marius Busemeyer, Achim Kemmerling and Kees van Kersbergen).

Dafni Kalatzi Pantera

Dafni is a third year PhD student at the University of Essex, Department of Government in the UK. She is mainly interested in environmental attitudes and corporate green commitments. In her dissertation, she studies the propagation of pro-environmental ideas. In particular, she examines how international forces influence individuals’ environmental attitudes, and how the domestic political system responds to this influence. Currently, as part of her dissertation she focuses on the localized effect of the COP meetings on environmental attitudes. In related projects, she focuses on natural disasters, green commitments by multinational corporations, and environmental protests. 

Before joining the Department of Government at Essex, she received a Master's degree in International Management at the Essex Business School and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and History at the Panteion University in Athens, Greece.

At the Cluster, Dafni is a guest of Prof. Gabriele Spilker.  To get in touch with her, you may write her an e-mail or visit her website.

Prof. Fabian Pfeffer, Ph.D.

Fabian Pfeffer is Associate Chair at the University of Michigan's Department of Sociology and Director of the Center for Inequality Dynamics. In his research, Fabian investigates social inequality and its maintenance across time and generations. His current projects focus on wealth inequality and its consequences for the next generation, the institutional context of social mobility processes and educational inequality in the United States and other industrialized countries. He is also greatly interested in expanding the social science data infrastructure and quantitative methods needed to address questions on inequality and mobility.

Fabian stayed at the Cluster until 30 June 2021.

Alexander Trubowitz

Alexander Trubowitz is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Yale University and was visiting student at the University of Konstanz for the 2021-2022 academic year. His dissertation research lies in the field of comparative political economy and is focused on the development of social insurance systems and financial markets in advanced capitalist societies. His time as a visiting researcher was generously supported by the Baden-Württemberg Stipendium and Yale’s MacMillan Center. 

Prof. Pieter Vanhuysse, Ph.D.

Pieter Vanhuysse is Full Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Department of Political Science and Public Management at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Odense. He also leads the Societies and Demographic Change research group at the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies. Pieter is Senior Fellow of Business and Social Sciences at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. He is a founding Board Member of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics at SDU's Faculty of Business and Social Sciences and a member of the Roster of Experts at Population Europe, the network of Europe's leading demographic research centres.

Pieters research is focusing on public policies, welfare states, democracy in East Central Europe, political demography, and intergenerational resource transfers and intergenerational justice.

Find more about Pieter here.