Dirk Witteveen

Researcher of Socio-Economic Inequalities and Social Policy

I'm a comparative social policy researcher and sociologist at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. My research lines focus on education, wage-setting mechanisms within firms and markets, wealth stratification, racial and ethnic earnings inequalities, immigration, intergenerational social mobility, elitism, mental health, and mass incarceration. Most of my studies contain a cross-national comparative angle. I use computational and other quantitative methods in my own research, while retaining a broad interest in advances in qualitative methods and social theory. 

Currently, I teach comparative social policy and political economy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention. I previously taught sociological theory for undergraduates in Human Sciences and Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE), and quantitative replication and research design for graduate students in Sociology and Demography. 

I obtained a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York (CUNY), the Graduate Center. I held visiting positions at Stockholm University (2015 and 2021) and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (AY '22-'23). I previously was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College, in Oxford. I am currently on the job market.

Some of my current projects involve the role of social class compositions of workplaces in class and racial earnings inequality, ethnic earnings inequalities in professional soccer, college wealth premia, intergenerational social mobility in the Global South, and the relationship between macro-economic conditions and occupational mobility variation between immigrants and natives in the early 20th-century.