Welcome!

I am a postdoc fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Ge190903_Leszczensky_Lars_1_klein_Stock_Farinarmany. Learn more about my research and me. (Here’s my CV.)

Currently, I am directing two projects, both of which are funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG):

  1. A project on religion, religiosity, and the social-emotional integration of young Muslims. In addition to the analysis of longitudinal network data, this project also collects qualitative and experimental data. Learn more about it here.
  2. A German-Israeli project on how ethnic composition and school ideology affects boundaries between Arab and Jewish students in Israel. This project is joint work with Yossi Shavit (Tel Aviv University) and Uri Shwed (Ben-​Gurion University of the Negev). Learn more about the project here.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim in 2016. In my dissertation thesis, I investigated the interplay of young immigrants’ host country identification and their friendships with natives. I further contributed to the DFG-funded project “Friendship and Identity in School”, which is a longitudinal study of adolescents’ social networks and their ethnic identifications. The data of the project are available via the Research Data Center of the German Center for Integration and Migratoin Research (DeZIM). For the project, I also developed a measure of immigrants’ national and ethnic identity, which is available via ZIS – Gesis.

My work appeared in journals such as American Sociological Review, Sociological Methods & Research, Social Forces, European Sociological Review, Social Networks, Social Science Research, and International Migration Review.