Profile

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My main research fields are globalization and transformation studies, where I am primarily interested in the question of how economic principles extend into ever-new spheres of social, political, and everyday life. At the heart of this question lie the ways in which markets, goods, and value are created, legitimised, reproduced, and changed. My empirical work therefore focuses – with varying degrees of emphasis – on practices, institutions, modes of transaction, and objects as the building blocks of this process.  

My particular interest for a long time has been the introduction of markets in the former centrally-planned economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In recent years I have occupied myself with the marketization of art and (sub)cultures, triggered by the creative industries debate and its respective urban policies; with the expansion of global value chains along West Africa’s frontier regions of marketization; and with the (self-)governance of everyday behaviour using sensor-software technologies and ‘smart’ choice architecture (nudging). 

Since 2006, I have lectured and conducted research at the Department of Human Geography at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Before that I was at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where I completed my PhD and habilitation. In 2003/04 I was a visiting fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and in 2000/01 I spent 18 months at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences in Moscow.



Curriculum Vitae

2019-20 Principal investigator and lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow
2016-18 Dean of the Faculty of Geoscience/Geography
since 2006 Professor of Economic Geography at the Department of Human Geography at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main
2006 Habilitation at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg, with the thesis “Privatizing the ‘Kolchoz Archipelago’: Paths and Detours of Russian Agriculture in the Global Market Society”
2003-04    Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, USA
2002-07 Visiting Lecturer with regular teaching duties at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Moscow
2000-01 Postdoctoral fellow with the German Research Foundation for 18 months of fieldwork in rural areas of Russia
1998-06 Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg
1998 PhD from Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, with the thesis “Ranges and Rules of Entrepreneurial Activity: An Institution-Oriented Perspective on Industrial Development in Palestine”
1995-98 Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg; associate member of the graduate program “Between Tradition and Renewal: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Transformations of Contemporary Societies in the Middle East” (German Research Foundation)
1991-95 Studied geography, economics and sociology in Freiburg, Munich and Erlangen