Paul Lazarsfeld Professorship

The Paul Lazarsfeld Professorship was created by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Vienna and is awarded to outstanding scholars with an innovative profile in the areas of theory and methodology in the empirical social sciences. The guest professorship includes a course in the doctoral programme in Social Sciences with a particular focus on advanced methods training and a public lecture at the inviting department.


Former Paul Lazarsfeld Professors include:

Thea Riofrancos
Providence College
Course: Multi-sited fieldwork and planetary processes in an era of geoeconomics (2024)

Christian Baden
Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Course: Integrating qualitative and quantitative textual analysis (2024)

Don Kalb
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
Course: Value: A radical approach (2024)

Paul Kellstedt
Texas A&M University
Course: Advanced topics in time series analysis (2024)

Michael Orsini
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa
Course: Feeling feminist methodologies: Affect, emotions and cultivating ways of knowing (2024)

Elisabeth Becker-Topkara
Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology, Heidelberg University
Course: From theory to methods: Interpretative approaches to cultural sociology (2023)

Daniela Dimitrova
Greenlee School of Journalism & Communication, Iowa State University
Course: Visual framing analysis (2023)

Frauke Kreuter
LMU Munich and University of Maryland
Course: Marienthal 2.0 – Design and methods to scale observational studies (2023)

Aditya Bharadwaj
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Course: Anatomy of Life: Towards methodological innovation in health research (2022)

Fabrizio Gilardi
Department of Political Science, University of Zurich
Course: Digital technology and politics: Computational social science approaches (2022)

Ching Kwan Lee
University of California, Los Angeles
Course: Comparative ethnography in development studies (2022)

Sven-Oliver Proksch
University of Cologne
Course: Quantitative text analysis of political speech (2022)

Ye Sun
Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong
Course: Foundational conceptual and methodological knowledge for conducting a meta-analysis (2022)

Sofia Zaragocin Carvajal
Department of International Relations, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Course: Contemporary decolonial methodologies and methods (2022)

Florian Foos
Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science
Course: Field experiments (2021)

Juan Grigera
King’s College London
Course: A critical appropriation of big data: Political economy at the crossroads of new methods (2021)

Michael R. Müller
Institute of Media Research, Chemnitz University of Technology
Course: Analyse visueller Sozialkommunikation am Beispiel von Robotik und KI-Design (2021)

Stefani Scherer
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
Course: Social inequality dynamics and life-course research. Substantive questions and methodological solutions (2021)

Bert N. Bakker
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam
Course: Transparent and reproducible social science research (2020)

Carrie Friese
Department of Sociology, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Course: Grounded theory and situational analysis (2020)

Hanna Kienzler
Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King's College London
Course: Researching vulnerable populations: Methodological, ethical and legal concerns (2019)

Wouter van Atteveldt
Department of Communication Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Course: Text analysis in R (2019)

Pablo Barberá
Department of Methodology, London School of Economics
Course: Social media data: Quantitative text analysis of big data (2018)

Cora Bender
Medienwissenschaftliches Seminar, Universität Siegen
Course: Medienethnographie: eine Methodenwerkstatt (2018)

Hendrik Wagenaar
Department of UrbanStudies and Planning, University of Sheffield
Course: Design and methods of interpretive social research (2018)

Cindy D. Clark
Faculty of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Camden
Course: Child-centered qualitative research in sociocultural research (2017)

Jennifer Jerit
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, New York
Course: Experimental methods (2017)

Stefan Hirschauer
Institut für Soziologie, Universität Mainz
Course: Ethnografisch forschen: Designs, Fragen, Methoden (2016)

Stuart Soroka
Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
Course: Content analysis in the social sciences: Human and automated approaches (2016)

Michaela Schäuble
Institut für Sozialanthropologie, Universität Bern
Course: Audio-visuelle Forschungsmethoden (2015)

Michael Schnegg
Institut für Ethnologie, Universität Hamburg
Courses: Einführung in die Netzwerkanalyse, Chancen und Grenzen des Vergleichs (2015)

Susumu Shikano
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz
Courses: Applied Bayesian statistics for social scientists, New developments in modelling party competition (2015)

George E. Marcus
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Courses: The ethnography as text, The viability and changing conditions of fieldwork (2014)

Judith Okely
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford
Course: Ethnographic practice (2013)

Gerd Spittler
Facheinheit Ethnologie, Universität Bayreuth
Course: Feldforschung als Balance zwischen wissenschaftlicher Distanz und dichter Teilnahme (2013)