Prof. Dr. Katrin Paula

Academic Career and Research Areas

Prof. Paula researches in the field of human security and contentious politics. A particular focus of her work is how changing information- and communication technologies affect political mobilization and violence. Exemplary research areas include the influence of information technologies on the spatial and temporal diffusion of protests, effects of state censorship and media on political and post-conflict attitudes, attitudes toward human rights, and the strategic use of violence during elections, as well as computational and quantitative methods in the field of conflict studies and statistical modeling of spatial processes.

Prof. Paula studied Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and holds a Dr. rer. soc. (PhD) from the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim (2019). Prior to joining TUM as Assistant Professor (tenure track) for “Global Security and Technology” in fall 2020, she was a researcher and lecturer at the Chair for Methods of Empirical Social Research and a researcher at the ERC Project "Repression and the Escalation of Violence" at the Chair of International Relations, both at the University of Mannheim.

Awards

• Academy of Sociology Dissertation Award for best dissertation submitted in the years 2019 and 2020 (2021)
• Lorenz-von-Stein-Preis for the best dissertation in the social sciences 2019 at the University of Mannheim (2020)
• Disseration Award Stiftung Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaften (2020)
• Bojanovsky-Preis for article publication “Sometimes Less Is More: News Falsification, Censorship, and Disapproval in 1989 East Germany”, published in the American Journal of Political Science (together with Ch. Gläßel) (2020)