Prof. Dr. Christian Imdorf

I graduated from the Swiss University of Fribourg with a major in social work and a minor in special education in the year 2000. I received my Ph.D. in educational sciences at the Universities of Fribourg in 2005 with precious support from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies’s doctorate program at the Universities of Bern. My dissertation thesis focused on school qualifications, national origin, gender and the transition to vocational education and training in Switzerland.

From 2006 to 2009 I conducted postdoctoral studies on employer discrimination in the hiring of apprentices at the Goethe University Frankfurt, at the Institute of Labour Economics and Industrial Sociology (LEST) in Aix-en-Provence and at the University of Glasgow. The research later resulted in my Habilitation.

I held a SNSF Research Professorship in Sociology at the University of Basel from 2011 to 2015 and moved to the University of Bern’s Institute of Sociology in June 2015, where I pursued my SNSF Professorship until 2017. This SNSF career funding facilitated my research programme on educational systems and gendered school-to-work transitions.

I received my postdoctoral lecture qualification in Sociology (Habilitation) from the University of Basel in 2016 and the French qualification for University Professorships in Sociology and Education (Agrégation) in 2018. Before I arrived at the Leibniz University Hannover in 2019, I worked as Associate Professor of Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim where I taught social theory at the Department of Sociology and Political Science.