Hello and welcome!
I am an empirical social scientist working in sociology and social policy. I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), based in the Centre’s sociology department — Research Department A, European Societies and their Integration — within its Social Inequality research area, on a fellowship generously funded by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. I completed my PhD in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where I passed my viva with no corrections and my degree was conferred in 2025.
My research sits at the intersection of sociology, social policy and comparative politics, and centres on social cohesion, social protection, and inequalities in welfare over the life course. My current project asks how the neighbourhood built environment shapes social cohesion and attitudes towards outgroups in ethnically diverse urban areas — treating the physical design of a neighbourhood as a condition that governs whether living among diverse neighbours actually produces meaningful contact between them.
I work primarily with qualitative and field-intensive methods. Since 2009 I have conducted interview-based fieldwork across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe, much of it in conflict-affected and fragile settings. I also work with longitudinal survey data. For a fuller account of my research and professional experience, please see my About page, or download my CV.
Please feel free to get in touch by email at anne.della.guardia.gast@uni-mannheim.de or acd110@georgetown.edu. You can also find me on Google Scholar, ORCiD and LinkedIn.
NEWS
- Trade reference book just published in 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic.
- Forthcoming article in Comparative Politics in October 2026 issue
- Paper accepted by the Social Policy Association‘s 2026 Conference.
- Won a two-year fellowship from the Baden-Württemburg Foundation from 2026 through 2027.
- Participating in the KODAQS Data Quality Academy’s Certificate Program, a program to expand upon data science skills and the quality-oriented use of social science data; run by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
NB: If you are kindly wondering about pronunciation, it’s Guar (as in guava)-dee-uh (as in up), and Della Guardia is a single surname. Della simply means “of the” and is not a second given name.