Ursula Apitzsch

Ursula Apitzsch (born 9 November 1947) is a German political scientist and sociologist. Since 1993, she has been Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt.[1] Her research fields are cultural analysis, biographical research, migration, ethnicity and gender.

She earned a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt in 1977, with the dissertation Gesellschaftstheorie und Ästhetik bei Georg Lukács bis 1933. In 1990, she earned the Habilitation from the University of Bremen with a thesis entitled Migration und Biographie which examined the education of young Italian migrants in the Rhine-Main region of Germany, and which affected migration studies in Germany.[2] Among her findings was that greater numbers of immigrants in a school led to greater acceptance, providing there was also mixing of social classes.[3] She is a member of the board of directors of the Frankfurt Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies since 1998, chaired the section on biographical research of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie 1995–1999,[2] and is a member of research committees of the International Sociological Association. In 2007 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association.[4]

She has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1992–93), Florence (1994), Rome (1998), Bologna (1999),[5] London (Open University and Tavistock Center, 2000), Brisbane (2002) and CNRS, Paris (2003).[2]

She coordinated an EU research project, Self-employment activities concerning women and minorities, 1997–2001. Until its conclusion in 2005, she was a leader in the EU research project EthnoGeneration, which studied second-generation members of migrant families engaged in business in primarily Northern European countries;[2][6] she led a follow-up project on female immigrants.[7]