Prof. Dr. Stefan Hirschauer

I studied sociology in Bielefeld and was editor of Zeitschrift für Soziologie for ten years after my doctorate. I subsequently held visiting professorships as a DFG Heisenberg Fellow in Paris, Vienna, and at Cornell University. In 2002, I became Professor of Gender Studies at LMU Munich, and in 2006 Professor of Sociological Theory and Gender Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

My research interests have long been in the field of ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative methods, and the sociology of gender difference. For example, I did my doctorate with an ethnography on transsexuality, worked on a sociology of pregnancy, and published on the topic of own culture as other. In parallel, I have continuously worked on theory-building, first on the theory of gender difference, then also on the sociology of the body, on the micro/macro problem, and on theories of practice.

In Mainz, I led DFG Research Unit 1939: “Un/doing Differences. Practices of Human Differentiation” from 2013 to 2019 and am now a spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1482 “Studies in Human Differentiation” My work in this role has a twofold direction: On the one hand, I am concerned with the inward integrative and evaluative theory work for the CRC, on the other hand with the inscription of its topic and basic concepts in the larger context of the theory formation of social and cultural studies.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich