Visitor address
Institute of Sociology
Georg Forster Building, Room 03-432
Jakob-Welder-Weg 12
55128 Mainz

If you wish to attend office hours, please contact me via email. Documents requiring a signature can be submitted to the secretary’s office; there’s no need to attend office hours for this purpose.

1985-1991: Studies in Hannover, Bielefeld and Paris

1991: Diplom, University of Hannover

1995: Doctorate (Ph.D.), Bielefeld University

2003: Habilitation, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)

since 2008: Professorship in Sociology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

[Detailed CV]

Materialität. Herausforderungen für die Aozial- und Kulturwissenschaften. [Materiality. Challenges for the Social and Cultural Studies]. Paderborn: Fink 2016 (ed. with Torsten Cress and Tobias Röhl).

Bildungspraxis. Körper – Räume – Objekte. [Educational Practice. Bodies – Spaces – Objects]. Weilerswist: Velbrück 2015 (ed. with Thomas Alkemeyer and Markus Rieger-Ladich).

Ethnography. The practice of field research. [Ethnography. The Practice of Field Research]. Stuttgart: UTB 2013 (2nd edition 2015; 3rd revised edition 2020) (with Georg Breidenstein, Stefan Hirschauer and Boris Nieswand).

Soziologie der Finanzmärkte. [Sociology of Financial Markets]. Bielefeld:
Transcript 2012 (ed. with Uwe Vormbusch).

Theoretische Empirie. Die Relevanz qualitativer Forschung. [Theoretical Empiricism. On the Relevance of Qualitative Research]. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2008 (2nd edition 2015; 3rd edition 2019) (ed. with
Stefan Hirschauer and Gesa Lindemann).

Facts and Figures. Economic Representations and Practices.
Marburg: Metropolis 2000 (ed. with Richard Rottenburg and
Hans-Jürgen Wagener).

Wohlerzogenheit. Eine Ethnographie deutscher Internatsschulen. [Well-Educated. An ethnography of German boarding schools]. Frankfurt/Main: Campus 1997.

[Detailed list of publications]


I conduct two lectures:

  1. Sociology of Education (2 hours per week)
  2. Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods (4 hours per week)

I conduct seminars on the following topics:

  1. Cultural and Practice Theories
  2. Sociology of Materiality and Artifacts
  3. Economic and Financial Sociology
  4. Sociology of Schooling and Teaching
  5. Classics of Sociology
  6. Qualitative Research Methods
  7. Document Analysis