Postdoctoral Researchers
Sarah is a cultural sociologist specializing in questions of emotion sociology and theories of subjectification. She holds an M.A. in German philology and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Vienna. She previously worked as a research associate at the Institute of Sociology (Chair of Prof. Dr. Sighard Neckel) at Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Hamburg, where she also completed her PhD. In her dissertation, Gefühlstechniken. Eine Kultursoziologie emotionaler Selbstvermessung (2024), she examined mood-tracking apps as an instructive case for analyzing contemporary emotion culture and developed a research program for the cultural-sociological study of apps. Beyond mood tracking, her work engages with topics such as sustainability, self-optimization, sociological diagnoses of contemporary societies, the role of emotions in political culture, and the aestheticization of so-called “lost places.”
She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary DFG Research Training Group 2726 The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where she is developing a sociological concept of the sentimental. Drawing on cultural-studies perspectives, she is particularly interested in what dimensions of emotional experience and social life come into view when the sentimental is approached through sociological theories and methods—and when it is taken seriously as an analytical lens for studying empirical phenomena, beyond its conventional normative reductions (for instance, as feminine, trivial, or merely staged).
For further insights into her sociological framework of the sentimental, see her chapter “A Cultural Sociology of the Sentimental: The Example of ‘Lost Places’” in the volume Sentimental State(s). Affective Politics of Order and Belonging (transcript 2025), which she co-edited with Heike Paul. You can also listen to an interview with her on the Podcast Thoughts on Feelings.
For more on publications, talks, and teaching: https://www.soziologie.phil.fau.de/institut/team/pritz/