Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences

Supervision

Find a supervisor

Supervisors are responsible for selecting suitable candidates. They assess whether a project aligns with their research interests and whether the candidate is sufficiently qualified and has the necessary resources (time, funding and materials) to complete the degree programme. They also consider whether they have the capacity to supervise the project and clarify mutual expectations with the candidate.

When applying for admission to the Doctoral Programme in Social Sciences, candidates must submit written confirmation from a faculty member who is permitted to supervise a doctoral thesis, stating their willingness to supervise the relevant project. Once a supervisor has agreed to supervise a project, they will help them prepare for admission.

Supervisors at ViDSS

  • Florian Arendt
    Health communication
  • Hajo Boomgaarden
    Media effects on political cognition, attitudes and behaviour | advancements in content analysis techniques | media, immigration and populist, extreme right parties | european integration – public opinion and media coverage
  • Viorela Dan
    Human–AI interaction, especially in political communication and journalism
  • Sabine Einwiller
    Public relations | strategic communication | crisis & conflict management
  • Gerit Götzenbrucker
    Critical technology and media analysis: impacts of new information and communication technologies | social network analysis | digital game studies
  • Folker Hanusch
    Comparative journalism studies | journalism culture | lifestyle journalism | indigenous journalism | journalism and memory
  • Friedrich Hausjell
    History of media and communication | journalism research | media and communication politics | migration, diversity and the media | disability and the media | public broadcasting | media competence
  • Petra Herczeg
    Children in our communications society | cross-cultural communication
  • Kathrin Karsay
    Entertainment research | media effects | mobile media & social media | digital well-being
  • Sophie Lecheler
    Political communication | political journalism | digitalisation and political media | news processing | emotions in news and politics | experimental research
  • Jörg Matthes
    Advertising | content studies | media content | reception & effects | research methods
  • Thomas R. Schmidt
    Media history | history of journalism | history of communication research
  • Desiree Schmuck
    The use and effects of digital media in childhood and adolescence | political engagement in digital environments | media change and (intergroup) relations | self-determined interactions with media innovations
  • Katharine Sarikakis
    Media governance and organisation | European media and cultural policies and European integration | international communication | gender and feminist epistemology in communication and cultural policy and international communications
  • Jolien Trekels
    Media use and effects | children and adolescents | media literacy | well-being and development
  • Annie Waldherr
    Computational social science | public sphere | social media | political participation | science & technology discourses
  • Claudia Wilhelm
    Gender and media | intersectionality | children, adolescents and media | reception and effects | social media | digital deviance
  • Julia Wippersberg
    Strategic communication | media competence

  • Eva Beaujouan
    Fertility and family | demographic change | unions and births over the life-course | quantitative methods | level of education & gender | international comparisons
  • Wolfgang Lutz
    World population | demographic methods | development of birth rates | demography and sustainable development | population projections
  • Marc Luy
    Health and longevity | differentials in morbidity and mortality | healthy ageing | demography of Europe | demographic methods | indirect estimation techniques | quasi-experimental settings
  • Erich Striessnig
    Demography and sustainable development | population projections | spatial demography | demographic methods | demographic transition

  • Antje Daniel
    Development studies| socio-ecological crisis and transformation | social movements studies | future and utopia | gender | youth | democracy | peace and conflict studies | decolonisation
  • Petra Dannecker
    Development sociology and development politics | globalization and migration processes | islamization processes in South and Southeast Asia | gender studies, international gender politics, and gender and migration | methodologies and qualitative methods | science-policy nexus | area expertise on Asia | transnationalization and development
  • Franziska Müller
    Development cooperation and global governance | critical theories of International Relations | postdevelopment theory | postcolonial/decolonial theory | energy transitions | energy justice | green finance | qualitative methods | Western and Southern Africa
  • Eva-Maria Muschik
    History of development | international organisations | humanitarianism | decolonisation

  • Kerstin Hämel
    Primary health care | long-term care | international comparative studies | patient and community participation | advanced practice nursing | interprofessional collaboration | working environments in nursing
  • Katharina Heimerl
    Palliative care | palliative geriatrics | caring community, dementia friendly community | participatory research
  • Martin Nagl-Cupal
    Family centered care | home care | pediadric care | living with chronical illness
  • Sabine Pleschberger
    The profession of nursing – policy & ethics | end-of-life care | care for older people | user perspective in health care | non-kin caregivers
  • Elisabeth Reitinger
    Palliative care for the elderly | dementia care | care ethics | gender and care

  • Dorothee Bohle
    Comparative Political Economy (varieties of capitalism, institutional political economy, welfare states & industrial relations, financialization) with a specific focus on East Central Europe
  • Reto Bürgisser
    Comparative political economy | comparative politics | political behaviour | fiscal policy | social policy | environmental policy | technological change | green transition | growth models
  • Ulrich Brand
    Historical-materialistic analyses of state, democracy and globalisation | historical-materialistic policy analysis | ecological crisis and global environmental governance | regional focus on Latin America | the role of knowledge in international politics
  • Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik
    Welfare states | parties and party competition | political elites | patronage and politicization in the public sector
  • Gerda Falkner
    European Union policies in the fields of digitalisation, welfare, working conditions, equality, and democracy
  • Dorit Geva
    Politics and gender | rightwing politics | neoliberalism | political sociology | historical sociology | political ethnography
  • Sylvia Kritzinger
    Political behaviour | electoral research | democratic representation | europeanisation of party politics | quantitative methods
  • Karin Liebhart
    Visual political communication | visual and discursive representations of politics | political cultures and popular cultures | rightwing populism and rightwing extremism | memory politics
  • Oliver Marchart
    Political theory | social theory | theories of democracy | history of political ideas | social movement research | political discourse analysis
  • Thomas Meyer
    Political institutions of representative democracies | political competition | political communication | coalition politics
  • Patrick Müller
    European studies | global governance and international institutions | European foreign and
    security policy | conflict resolution | Middle East
  • Katharina Theresa Paul
    Interpretive policy analysis | public health policy | (digital) health governance | politics of knowledge and ignorance
  • Carolina Plescia
    Voting behavior | electoral systems | digital democracy | public opinion | political psychology
  • Barbara Prainsack
    Health policy | practices, institutions and politics of solidarity | political, social and ethical aspects of Personalised Medicine | data-rich practices in science and medicine | regulation of DNA technologies in medicine and forensics | comparative science & technology policy
  • Peter Slominski
    European Integration with focus on EU energy policy | the EU’s fight against climate change
  • Alice Vadrot
    Global environmental politics | practices, discourses and institutions in international biodiversity politics | institutions interfacing science and policy & global environmental assessments | knowledge and power in international politics | international marine biodiversity politics
  • Markus Wagner
    Issues and ideologies in party competition and vote choice | British politics
  • Fabio Wolkenstein
    Democratic theory | political representation | political ideologies (esp. Social democracy, conservatism and Christian democracy) | theories of partisanship and activism | constitutional theory
  • Christopher Wratil
    Political representation and behaviour | European Union politics | public opinion | populism | advanced quantitative methods

  • Sarah Davies
    Critical studies of science communication, public engagement with science, and amateur science | public interactions with digitised science and technology | the contemporary conditions of academic work and knowledge production | digitisation within scientific knowledge production
  • Ulrike Felt
    Questions of the development and interaction of different forms of knowledge, research communication as well as participation and governance in technoscience | the importance of time/temporality in technoscientific constellations | topics relating to the politics of knowledge, focusing on changes of research cultures as well as institutional reforms, questions of quality assurance mechanisms, etc.
  • Maximilian Fochler
    Changing cultures and practices of academic knowledge production | entanglements of academic knowledge production with other societal logics (particularly the economy) | societal responsibility of science | institutional change in the organization and communication of science | participation of publics in knowledge production processes
  • Christian Haddad
    Medical science & technology studies (STS) | sociology and politics of global health policy | social studies of health and medicine | sociology and political economy of pharmaceuticals (antimicrobial resistance, pandemic preparedness, health R&D, mental health)
  • Nina Klimburg-Witjes
    Infrastructures and global politics | technology, innovation and security | social studies of outer space and imagined futures of Earth-Space relations | science, technology and international relations | fieldwork in contexts of secrecy
  • Fredy Mora Gámez
    Technoscience and social movements | knowledge and expertise within migration and border policies | technoscience, material politics, and everyday life | digital activisms | social studies of border control and surveillance technologies | critical studies of population data infrastructures | feminist technoscience studies | decoloniality and STS | ethnography and digital methods | knowledge, technology and human rights | sociomaterial understandings of reparation and remembrance

  • Judith Bovensiepen
    Social, political and environmental anthropology | animism, Catholicism and religious transformations | cosmology and social change | violence, conflict and post-conflict recovery | kinship and house-based societies | anthropology of place and landscape | anthropology of oil and natural resource extraction | Southeast Asia and the Pacific
  • Ayse Caglar
    Globalisation and transnationalisation processes | transformations of nation states and the changing property relations | migration | urban restructuring and migrants | cultural industries | transnational legal spaces | citizenship | ethnographies of the state | Roma in Europe | family law | European cultural policies, immigrant cultural production and cultural industries | nationalism and nationalist discourses | theories of ideology, popular and consumer culture
  • Manuela Ciotti
    Identity politics | art world | politics of materiality | modernity | political agency | gender and politics | Dalit communities | postcolonial studies | social media | digital anthropology | politics of representation | Global South | India and South Asia
  • Sabine Grenz
    Qualitative empirical methodology | gender methodology and epistemology | gender, diversity and intersectionality | gender, secularism and religion | gender and sexuality/sexualities (especially in connection with commercial sexuality) | historical perspectives on gender constructions | institutionalisation and history of gender studies
  • Suzanna Jovicic
    Digital anthropology | design anthropology | psychological and psychiatric anthropology | digital ethnography | youth | work | addiction | technology | mental health | participatory research | science communication
  • Janina Kehr
    Political anthropology of health and illness | global infectious diseases, biopolitics and planetary health | hospital spaces and places | healthcare and the economy | biomedicalization, pharmaceutical consumption and the environment
  • Wolfgang Kraus
    Social and cultural anthropology of North Africa and the Middle East | ethnolinguistic identity and current political developments in Morocco | tribal societies – identity and socio-political forms | memory and historical awareness
  • Monika Palmberger
    Migration | displacement and placemaking | borders and citizenship | digital anthropology and digital ethnography | (transnational) care and ageing | generation, gender and the life course | memory and politics of history
  • Peter Schweitzer
    Anthropology of climate change | indigenous movements | cultures and identities | mobilities (of people and ideas) | postsocialisms | social-ecological systems | history of science
  • Andreas Streinzer
    Economic anthropology | materialist approaches to sex and gender | queer anthropology | social reproduction | critical ethnography | anthropology of labour | racialisation and inequality | deservingness and moralisation | anthropology in/of Europe
  • Tatjana Thelen
    Kinship and political anthropology (including gender and generation, citizenship and ethnography of the state, Roma) | care and social security | post-socialist transformations (with special emphasis on Hungary, Romania, eastern Germany) | relational theory and social networks
  • Sanderien Verstappen 
    Visual and multimodal anthropology | (in)visibilities | mobility – migration, transnationalism, displacement | development – urbanization, residential segregation, rural-urban linkages | Global South Asia
  • Patricia Zuckerhut
    Feminist anthropology | Post- and Decoloniality | anthropology of sexualized and gendered violence | peasants | household and community | anthropological concepts of personhood | cosmovision | Latin America with focus on Mexico

  • Caroline Berghammer
    Social stratification research | quantitative methods | family sociology | life course research | international comparative research
  • Valeria Bordone
    Age and ageing (population ageing, individual ageing, subjective age, active ageing) | family sociology (intergenerational relationships, grandparent(hood)) | life course research | quantitative methods of social research
  • Emma Dowling
    Sociology of social change | emotional and affective labour | social reproduction and welfare state transformation | globalisation and transnational civil society | sociology of financialisation
  • Anna Durnová
    Sociology of emotions | cultural sociology | political sociology | resistance | care & well-being | intimacy | interpretive methods | feminist sociology
  • Eva Flicker
    Sociology of film, media and communication | visual sociology | group dynamics/teams/organisations | gender research | career paths of academics
  • Yuri Kazepov
    International urban sociology (poverty, segregation, governance, local social policy, city regeneration projects, multilevel governance, EU-state-city relations, life situation analysis) | comparative social policy (welfare regimes, social benefits, activations policies, migration, rescaling and regionalising of social policy, citizenship, cross-country comparison, EU and social policy)
  • Franz Kolland
    Social gerontology (education in later life, culture of ageing, lifestyles, use of new technologies) | educational sociology (students’ behaviour and study paths) | sociology of developing countries (tourism)
  • Ana Mijic
    Qualitative (interpretive and reconstructive) social research | migration and forced migration | research on identity | sociology of knowledge
  • Michael Parzer
    Culture | social inequality | migration | interpretative social research
  • Michaela Pfadenhauer
    Phenomenologically oriented sociology of knowledge | social constructivism as paradigm of social sciences | cultural change and mediatisation | challenges of social robotics for sociality | life-world analytical ethnography
  • Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
    Migration | mobility | transnational social relations | methodologies and methods of interpretative social research
  • Nadia Steiber
    Quantitative methods | social inequality and social mobility | employment and labour market research | population ageing | education sociology | family sociology | life course research | international comparative research
  • Dagmar Vorlicek
    Sociology of security | international political sociology | science, technology, and expertise | technopolitics | global health and biological risks | international politics | Global East & Central and Eastern Europe | qualitative and interpretive research methods
  • Anna Wanka
    Social inequalities | doing difference | practice theories | new materialisms / posthumanism | queer theory | chrononormativity | age constructions across the life course | life course transitions | mixed- and multi-methods research | participatory approaches
  • Ulrike Zartler
    Family sociology | childhood sociology | separation/divorce and their consequences | sociological analysis of family and child laws | qualitative methods in childhood and family research

  • Valentina Ausserladscheider
    Economic sociology | political economy | institutional change | ideas in discourse | climate change and how political and economic elites react to crisis
  • Alexander Filipović
    Ethics of public communication (media ethics) | pragmatism (and social sciences) | ethics of technology/digital ethics | normative aspects of social theories | political ethics/practical social philosophy | (empirical) social sciences and ethics | basic questions of Christian social ethics
  • Bernhard Kittel
    Experimental social justice research | experimental committee decision-making and election research | employment and labor market research | international comparative analysis of welfare states and industrial relations
  • Dirk Lange
    Civic Consciousness | democratic education | inclusive citizenship education | migration and civic education | civic education research | historical political education
  • Astrid Mattes-Zippenfenig
    Governance of diversity, religion and migration | politics of religion | new Christian right | religion in Austria | Islam in Europe | youth religion | digital religion
  • Heinz Christoph Steinhardt
    Popular protest | surveillance and privacy | social credit | social trust | civil society | political identities | Chinese-speaking societies | survey research | content analysis
  • Christian Swertz
    Epistemology of media education | media education contributions to society | resistant and creative media education practice

ViDSS membership for supervisors: Supervisors in the social sciences employed by the University of Vienna on a contract of 50% or more can join ViDSS. Honorary professors at the Faculty of Social Sciences can join ViDSS for as long as they maintain close connections with their department, for example through regular teaching contracts. Participation in ViDSS requires active consent to the Code of Good Practice for Doctoral Schools, as well as a commitment to participating in the Doctoral School’s activities. Supervisors who retire from the University of Vienna may remain members of the Doctoral School for up to three years after leaving. Those who transfer to another university can also remain ViDSS members for up to three years, provided they maintain close ties with the University of Vienna, for example through regular teaching contracts. To join ViDSS as a student member, doctoral candidates need to have at least one supervisor who is a ViDSS member. 

Form a supervisory team

The Directorate of Studies strongly recommends that doctoral candidates and the supervisor who has supported them during admission to the doctoral programme ensure that more than one person is responsible for supporting the candidate during their doctoral studies. There are three ways to include additional persons in supervisory or advisory roles after admission to the programme. These options can be combined.

Option 1: Two or more professors

A regular supervisory team encompasses the main supervisor and one or more additional supervisors from the University of Vienna or other research institutions who are entitled to supervise doctoral theses at the University of Vienna. In general, this includes professors, associate professors and assistant professors and persons holding a habilitation or equivalent. All supervisors are equally responsible for the doctoral thesis project.

Administrative steps

In both cases, if the additional supervisor is not from the University of Vienna, you need to enclose their curriculum vitae and list of publications with the documents.

Apply for an additional supervisor

Option 2: Postdoctoral staff members

Postdoctoral non-tenured staff members may take the role of an officially registered postdoctoral co-supervisor (“Mitbetreuer*innen”) as specified in the Statutes of the University of Vienna (§ 15 (11). This is subject to the condition that the postdoc has acquired third-party funds for the doctoral candidate’s employment for addressing the topic while taking into account international reviews (Austrian Science Fund, European Commission). Please contact us if this applies to your case.

Postdoctoral non-tenured staff members who do not fulfil this requirement in the respective case can take on the role of a postdoctoral member of a ViDSS Supervisory Team, if the doctoral candidate is a ViDSS member. Postdoctoral members of ViDSS Supervisory Teams are not co-supervisors (“Mitbetreuer*innen”) as specified in the Statutes of the University of Vienna and will therefore not be named on the title page of a completed dissertation.

Administrative steps

Apply for the inclusion of a postdoctoral staff member

  • Alice Binder
    Jaroslava Kaňková (main supervisor: Jörg Matthes)
    Selina Noetzel (main supervisor: Jörg Matthes)
  • Letizia Bonanno
    Wilma Jovell (main supervisor: Tatjana Thelen)
  • Ayse Dursun
    Manuela Stein da Silva Barbosa (main supervisor: Birgit Sauer)
  • Jakob-Moritz Eberl
    Jana Bernhard (main supervisor: Hajo Boomgaarden)
    Noelle Sophie Lebernegg (main supervisor: Hajo Boomgaarden)
  • Jana Egelhofer
    Teresa Weikmann (main supervisor: Sophie Lecheler)
  • Jens Hagelstein
    Jeannine Huber (main supervisor: Sabine Einwiller)
  • Clara Juarez Miro
    Diego Garusi (main supervisor: Folker Hanusch)
  • Endale Kebede
    Afua Durowaa-Boateng (main supervisor: Éva Beaujouan)
  • Aytalina Kulichkina
    Muhammad Noor Fakhruzzaman (main supervisor: Annie Waldherr)
  • Ester Lazzari
    Lukas Gutmorgeth (main supervisor: Éva Beaujouan)
  • Fabienne Lind
    Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam (main supervisor: Hajo Boomgaarden)
    Moritz Sedlatschek: (main supervisor: Annie Waldherr)
    Marvin Stecker (main supervisors: Hajo Boomgaarden and Markus Wagner)
  • Phoebe Maares
    Kim Löhmann (main supervisor: Folker Hanusch)
  • Ariadne Neureiter
    Christina Brandstetter (main supervisor: Jörg Matthes)
  • Olga Povoroznyuk
    Elena Davydova (main supervisor: Peter Schweitzer)
  • Christopher Ruppel
    Julia Stranzl (main supervisor: Sabine Einwiller)
  • Svenja Schäfer
    Anna Maria Planitzer (main supervisor: Sophie Lecheler)
    Andrea Stockinger (main supervisor: Sophie Lecheler)
  • Andrea Schikowitz
    Esther Dessewffy (main supervisor: Sarah Davies)
  • Lukas Schlögl
    Diana Bashur (main supervisor: Barbara Prainsack)
  • Petro Tolochko
    Jana Bernhard (main supervisor: Hajo Boomgaarden)
    Noelle Sophie Lebernegg (main supervisor: Hajo Boomgaarden)
  • Bernadette Uth
    Birte Leonhardt (main supervisor: Folker Hanusch)
  • Ingrid Wahl
    Jeannine Huber (main supervisor: Sabine Einwiller)
    Vivien Marx (main supervisor: Sabine Einwiller)
    Neda Ninova-Solovykh (main supervisor: Sabine Einwiller)
  • Ayşe Seda Yüksel-Pecen
    Katrin Kremmel (main supervisor: Ayşe Çağlar)
    Catherine Raya Polishchuk (main supervisor: Ayşe Çağlar)

ViDSS membership for postdoctoral co-supervisors: If you are officially registered as postdoctoral co-supervisor as specified in the Statutes of the University of Vienna (“Mitbetreuer*in”), you can join ViDSS as well, if you consent to the responsibilities of postdoctoral members of ViDSS Supervisory Teams. Please submit your consent to vds-sosci(at)univie.ac.at. 

Option 3: Thesis Advisory Committee (TAC)

If the doctoral candidate is a ViDSS member, the candidate and the supervisors can establish a thesis advisory committee (TAC). A TAC includes the supervisors of the project, the postdoctoral members of the supervisory team (if any, see option 2) and two or three mentors. 

Mentors need to have at least senior postdoc level, one mentor needs to be external, i.e. from another research institution. They provide advice and support to the doctoral student and supervisors during the annual TAC meetings, assess the student-supervisor relationship and mediate in case of misunderstandings or conflicts. Please note that (former) mentors are not allowed to act as reviewers of the doctoral thesis.

Administrative steps

  • If you have agreed upon the establishment of a TAC with all supervisors and with the mentors whom you would like to suggest, please send an email to the administration team of the doctoral school including the names of the mentors. Please Cc all members of your supervisory team and the suggested mentors. An application for the establishment of a TAC can be submitted after the doctoral thesis agreement has been completed.
  • With the application, mentors consent to the Code of Good Practice for Doctoral Schools, including the Responsibilities of the TAC (PDF).
  • For more information, please consult this information sheet (PDF).
  • The statement from the TAC Meeting needs to be included in the annual progres report.

Apply for a TAC

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