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Social processes are at the center of my work. I investigate segregation, stratification, and the emergence of social categories in various domains, for example in schools, science, and art. I am guided by theories from relational sociology, network theory, cultural sociology, action theory (neuro)phenomenology, and field theory.
Methodologically, I use traditional statistics, network analysis, and large language models (LLMs). These tools help me to capture social processes and to study how they evolve over time.
This combination of theory and methods allows me to identify general mechanisms and patterns in different social systems. For example, how elites centralize resources and recognition orr how cultural content diversifies or narrows over time. Also, I study how social processes are shaped by context, history and institutions.
Currently, I am investigating how novelty and topical diversity in scientific fields are affected by long-term changes in competition among scholars. Further ongoing research projects study how historical changes in the Hollywood film industry influenced the distribution of recognition among filmmakers. In the future, I plan to develop and test an integrative theory of how social processes centralize human attention and, thereby, influence social structure, cultural phenomena, and individual life outcomes.
Within the European Research Council project Social Integration and Boundary Making in Adolescence, I contributed to the exploration of interethnic relationships among adolescents and studied the emergence of ethnic labels in adolescents’ peer ecologies (2018-2022). My doctoral thesis focused on the contextual antecedents for the emergence of status orders across different empirical domains, such as the school setting, science, and
cultural fields. From January 2024 to April 2024, I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Afterward, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart until I started at CEU in September 2024.