Professor Maria Pohn-Lauggas

Maria Pohn-Lauggas completed her degree in sociology at the University of Vienna in 2004 where she also completed her doctorate in 2012. From 2013 to 2016, the researcher held a Hertha Firnberg Fellowship at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the equivalent of the German Research Foundation. From 2017 to 2018, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. From 2018 to 2024, Maria Pohn-Lauggas was Junior Professor of Methodological Plural Social Research at the Institute for Methods and Methodological Foundations of the Social Sciences at the Georg August University of Göttingen. In fall 2024, she moved to Ruhr University Bochum as Heisenberg Professor for Qualitative Methods of Social Research.

Maria Pohn-Lauggas researches collective histories of violence and their impact on contemporary societies. She focuses on the persecution of certain groups under National Socialism, such as homosexuals, so-called asocials and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as slavery and the slave trade in certain regions of Ghana and Brazil. In every case, her approach results in an international framework. The Heisenberg project, for which she is funded with her professorship, is based on the key question: “How can qualitative and interpretative methods be combined in contexts that are permeated by taboos, collective experiences of violence and specific power relations?”

Maria Pohn-Lauggas is a biographical researcher. One of her main research tools is the biographical-narrative interview in combination with family discussions, participant observation, discourse analysis and even visual sociology, i.e. the analysis of images and interviews about images that significantly shape our memories.