Curriculum Vitae

Patricia Frericks took up the professorship of Sociology and Economy of the Welfare State at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kassel in 2017. Previously, she was Professor of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki and co-director of the Centre for Globalisation and Governance, Research Area 2 on "Change in institutional constellations in welfare states", a Research Center of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg.

Patricia Frericks forms part of the “European database of outstanding women scientists” AcademiaNet since being awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship by the DFG in 2016 (declined). She completed her habilitation in sociology at the University of Hamburg in 2014, where she had been a research assistant in Social Structure Analysis at the Chair of Birgit Pfau-Effinger since 2008. The title of her habilitation thesis is "Social inequality and leading principles in welfare states: the impact of institutional marketization, fragmentation and equalization on the social structure." Previously, she completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in 2007 at Utrecht University, where she had been working as a research assistant in a European research project since 2003. The title of her PhD is "Setting rights: resource flows, life-course norms and the dynamics of citizenship in European pension systems". After her studies in political science and theology at the Universities of Bonn, Innsbruck and Jerusalem, that she completed with a parliamentarism theoretical work based on an empirical investigation of minority decisions on marriage law in the Israeli parliament, she was research intern at the UN and WHO in Geneva, investigating the mandate of the UN in time of communicable disease.

She has researched and taught at the Universities of Erfurt, Hamburg, Helsinki, London (LSE), Turin and Utrecht. She has worked in numerous European research projects and led sub-projects (5th, 6th and 7th Research Framework Program) as well as acquired and led her own European comparative third-party funded projects. Her research and publications focus on comparative welfare state and capitalism research, on the theory, methodology and empirics of institutional change, and on social inequality, redistribution and rights over resources. She is particularly interested in the economization of social security and care as well as the readjustment of societal resources and life courses. In her European comparative sociological studies, she analyzes in particular the transformation of welfare institutions with regard to old-age security, unemployment, poverty, care policy, family policy and institutionalized life courses. Furthermore, she works on the financial and social sustainability of social systems and analyzes the interplay of welfare states, welfare markets, economic systems and social structures. She has published the results of her research widely, especially in international blind peer-reviewed journals with high impact factors.