Dr. Helena Hof, 2021-2025
Curriculum Vitae
Helena Hof was a Principal Investigator of the
research project Foreign entrepreneurs in
Tokyo's and Singapore's knowledge-intensive start-up sector, which is part
of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded
four-year collaborative project “'Skill' in the Migration Process of
Foreign Workers in Asia”. Helena is a migration researcher trained in sociology
and with experience of extensive ethnographic work. She is interested in the
nexus of mobility studies, the sociology of work and new ways of working such
as in startups and related innovation, skilled and middle class migration,
ethnicity, race, and gender, as well as global cities, having a strong focus on
Japan and comparative research. In her doctoral and postdoctoral research in
Tokyo, Japan, she focused on the entanglements of physical mobility, career
mobility and social mobility in European migrants’ early-career trajectories in
the global cities Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo. Helena’s home institution is
the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where she is a Senior Research and
Teaching Fellow at the Department of Japanese Studies, program advisor of the
Master of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and group leader of the collaborative
research group for PhD students of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She
is also a visiting researcher at Waseda University’s Institute of Asian
Migrations in Tokyo and the Asian Migration cluster of the Asia Research
Institute, National University of Singapore, as well as book reviews editor of
the academic journal Transitions:
Journal of Transient Migration.