Marc Helbling
Principal Investigator
Marc Helbling is full professor in political sociology at the Department of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and a senior researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. His research fields include immigration and citizenship politics, nationalism, xenophobia/islamophobia. His work has appeared among others in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Political Research, International Migration Review, Political Studies, Social Forces and West European Politics. He has edited a volume on “Islamophobia in the West” (Routledge) and co-authored a book with Hanspeter Kriesi, Edgar Grande et al. on “Political Conflict in Western Europe” (Cambridge UP). He studied political science at the University of Lausanne and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and holds a PhD from the University of Zurich. He was a guest researcher at Princeton, Harvard and New York University and spent shorter research stays at the European University Institute in Florence, at Oxford University, the University of Sydney and at McGill University.
Webpage: www.marc-helbling.ch
Research collaborators
Liv Bjerre
Liv Bjerre is a research fellow at the WZB. She holds a MSc in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen. She is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her PhD project is focused on the effect of immigration policy on irregular immigration.
Friederike Römer
Friederike Römer is a research fellow in the project Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) and in the unit Inequality and Social Policy (USP) at WZB. She holds a MSc in Sociology from the University of Mannheim. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Social Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin. In her PhD she researches the nexus of immigrant social rights, the welfare state and immigration policy.
Samuel D. Schmid
Sam Schmid is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He holds a BA in Political Science and a MA in World Society and Global Governance from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. His dissertation, which is supervised by Rainer Bauböck and Maarten Vink, analyzes the relationship between immigration and citizenship policies in immigrant-receiving democracies.
Stephan Simon
Stephan Simon is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Political Sociology at the University of Bamberg. He currently develops his dissertation topic and teaches seminars about ethnic discrimination and ethnic exclusion at the University of Bamberg. His research interests comprise ethnic discrimination, social inequalities, immigration policies and global religious movements.
Malisa Zobel
Malisa Zobel is a research fellow at the WZB. She got her degree in Political Science and Cultural Studies from University of Potsdam and Humboldt University in Berlin. Her dissertation, which is supervised by Michael Minkenberg at European University Viadrina, focuses on the effects of radical right party mobilization on immigration policymaking.
Student assistants
Anne Bohm
Anne Bohm is working as a student assistant at the IMPIC project. She joined the project in February 2015. She holds a Bachelor of Art in Sociology and Spanish Philology from University of Potsdam. She is currently in the masters program for European Studies at European University Viadrina.
Florian Eyert
Florian Eyert is currently pursuing his MA in Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin. He contributed to the IMPIC project as an intern and student assistant in 2013 and 2014. His fields of interest include political sociology, migration policies, citizenship studies and nationalism.
Maren Hahnen
Maren Hahnen is pursuing a MSc in Economics at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her studies focus on microeconomics and empirical analysis. She contributed to IMPIC in the course of an internship in 2013 by e.g. developing some of the methodology used for the index. Maren holds a BSc in Economics.
Jonas Kahle
Jonas Kahle is specialist in Market and Social Research at the WZB’s Data Management. He focuses on online data collection, generating datasets and the management of research databases. Jonas constructed the online questionnaire for the IMPIC expert survey and the underlying database, tailored tabulations and syntaxes therefrom, and thus assisted the project from an early phase to the end.
Dorina Kalkum
Dorina Kalkum studies political science and sociology at Humboldt University with a focus on statistical analysis, discrimination and migration. She started working as a student assistant in the project in October 2015 and is currently analyzing migration policy convergence in the European Union based on the IMPIC database.
Andrea Pürckhauer
Andrea Pürckhauer worked as student assistant in the Immigration Policies in Comparison Project (IMPIC) for two years. She studied Political Science and International Economics at the University of Tübingen, Potsdam and the FU Berlin. In her master thesis, which was written within the IMPIC project, she analyzed European immigration policies in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis.
Hannah Schilling
Hannah Schilling is fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University Berlin. She worked as a student assistant for one year at the early phase of the IMPIC project. She holds a MA in Sociology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. In her PhD, she researches the impact of precarization of labour on social networks of provisioning for urban youth and brings into dialogue urban realities in the Global North and South.