welcome

Hi! I am Berenike Firestone, a political and comparative-historical sociologist. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Inequality, Transformation and Conflict at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Research. At the institute, I coordinate the research area Social Change and Transformation. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York City. 

Broadly, my research is about far-right politics and support for pluralistic democracy, and the ways in which history and memory shape both of those things. I use a variety of methods, including experiments, statistical analysis of observational data, and in-depth qualitative analysis of archival data. 

For examples of my work, please see a publication in Social Forces on the effect of Holocaust representations and a publication in Psychological Science on the impact of a digital memory project, both co-authored with Ruth Ditlmann and Oguzhan Turkoglu. If you speak German, check out this interview on Deutschlandfunk about our digital memory study, which recently won an award.