Prof. Dr. Karen Schönwälder

Karen Schönwälder is a guest at the Institute. Until August 2025, she was a Research Group Leader in the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity and an Extracurricular Professor at Georg August University Göttingen. As guest researcher she remains linked with the Institute. Her research focuses on societal responses to diversity, the presence of immigrants in politics, and policies shaping heterogeneous societies. Before joining the Institute, Karen Schönwälder was head of the Program on Intercultural Conflicts and Societal Integration at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and Privatdozentin at the Free University Berlin. She obtained a Dr. phil. from Marburg University in 1990, and completed her habilitation in Political Science in 2001 at Gießen University. Past positions include a Lectureship at the University of London and a semester as a Visiting Professor at Haifa University, Israel. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee for Migration and Participation of the regional government and the Niedersachsen Integration Council. She also belonged to advisory committees of research projects on diversity in the federal administration, on immigrants in the German federal election and of the Advisory Board of the Deutsche Institut für Urbanistik.