Welcome!
Prof. Dr. Florian Hertel joined Europa-Universität Flensburg as Professor of Quantitative Methods in Empirical Social Research and Social Structure Analysis and Chair of the Department of Central Methodology (ZML) on February 1, 2023. The department provides quantitative methods training for almost every sixth student at EUF. Prof. Dr. Hertel's research focuses on the causes and consequences of social inequality, particularly intergenerational class and educational mobility and their consequences for social permeability, political radicalization, and notions of social conflict. He is also interested in methodological issues related to measuring inequality.
Strengthening quantitative inequality research at EUF
At EUF, Prof. Hertel will primarily strengthen quantitative inequality research and social structure analysis and address methodological questions about the analytical potential of class, status and income measures. His management courses will mainly focus on quantitative empirical methods.
Head of the early-stage researchers group ACCESS
Since 2021, Prof. Dr Hertel has headed the ACCESS junior research group, which is supported by 1.87 million euros in funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science. Currently and until 2026, Prof. Dr. Hertel together with two doctoral students and a postdoc are investigating how admission procedures influence the development of social inequality in university access and choice of degree program. The early-stage research group is based in the International Centre for European Studies (ICES) at EUF.
Active in sociological associations
Prof. Dr. Hertel studied Classical Archaeology, Eastern European Studies, Political Science, Economics and Sociology at the Free University of Berlin from 2002 to 2009. In 2015, he completed his doctorate at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) with a thesis on "Social Mobility over the course of the 20th century in Germany and the United States". From 2015 to 2016 he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute Florence, from 2016 to 2021 he was a research associate (post-doc) in Methods of Empirical Social Research at the Chair of Sociology at Universität Hamburg, and from 2017 to 2018 he held a substitute professorship in sociology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
In 2020, Hertel was awarded the International Sociological Association's (ISA) RC28 Significant Scholarship Award for the publication "The Relation between Inequality and Intergenerational Class Mobility in 39 Countries." He is active in the Social Inequality and Social Structure Analysis [Soziale Ungleichheit und Sozialstrukturanalyse] section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and in Research Committee 28 on Social Mobility and Inequality at the International Sociological Association (ISA).