Team Anna Durnova

Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology. She serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Policy & Politics and vice president of the International Public Policy Association.
Previously, she was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (Elise Richter Fellow), as well as at Charles University in Prague and the University of Lyon. Numerous international stays, including Visiting Research Fellow at Concordia University in Montreal (2019) or Essex University in the UK (2012).
Research interests: political sociology, sociology of emotions, public policy, feminist sociology, women's health and sociology of the body, interpretive social research.

Sylvia is currently completing their Bachelor's degree in Sociology and will start her Master's degree at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Vienna in the summer semester of 2023. Since February 2022, Sylvia has been working as a study assistant for Prof. Anna Durnova and is also working on a research project in the field of political and body sociology at the Institute. Other research focuses include queer theory, especially lesbian studies, intersectional social theory, and social inequality studies.

Till Hilmar is a postdoctoral reasearcher in Anna Durnova's team. He received his PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2019. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an assistant editor of the American Journal of  Cultural Sociology. Before coming to Vienna, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Bremen University's SOCIUM – Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy.
His research interests include inequality, cultural and political sociology, social memory, social networks, post-1989 transformations, and text-as-data. He is interested in how people experience and affectively reason about economic change and social inequality, and how this is linked to trust and a sense of social inclusion or exclusion. He also studies public narratives about social and economic policies.
His book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, to be published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.

Martina Jurakova studied social pedagogy and educational science and is currently on the home stretch of her sociology bachelor’s degree. As of October 2022, she became part of the team working on the international project REACTOR. This project analyzes resistance to media, political representation, and scientific expertise. It aims at comparative research between the Czech Republic, Denmark, the USA, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

Vendula, a graduate of Charles University's law program, holds an LLM in Health, Law and Society from the University of Bristol. Prior to joining the Vienna team, she underwent judicial training at the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic and completed a traineeship at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, where she specialized in tobacco control, disease prevention, and health promotion. Her area of research interest lies in the sociology of law and legal theory in health-related matters. As of September 2022, Vendula is engaged in the international research project REACTOR, which compares resistance to media, political representation, and scientific expertise across the Czech Republic, Denmark, the USA, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

Julia studied Sociology at the University of Vienna and Copenhagen. From 2017 to 2022, Julia was a student assistant at the Institute for Advanced Studies, mainly focusing on topics of new technology, ethics, and gender. Since 2022, Julia has been working as a project assistant in the field of political sociology at the department, researching issues of self-determination in liberal democracies and reproductive justice. Complementary to her research in political sociology, her main research interests lie in the realm of labor and industrial sociology, alongside feminist and intersectional social theory.

Dagmar Vorlíček is a university assistant (post-doc) at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the sociology of crisis and the politics of global insecurities. Dagmar is an interdisciplinary social scientist drawing on sociology, International Relations, and Science and Technology Studies. Empirically, she specializes in global health and biological security. She conducted and published research on bioweapons, biotechnologies, biobanks, dual-use research, and global health.
Dagmar serves as the Head of Board of the Institute of International Relations Prague and as a member of the Executive Board of the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA). She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Global Health Policy, University of Sussex, a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) Vienna, and a member of the Transnational Hub "Doing International Political Sociology". Previously, she worked as a Lecturer in Global Insecurities at the University of Sussex and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the IHS Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an M.A. in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich) and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam).