Dr. Vera Trappmann is an Assistant Professor in Economic Sociology at Osnabrück University. She received her PhD in 2009 in political sociology at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder, being a member of the first joint Polish-German post-graduate school. Her PhD analysed company restructuring linked to labour market policy development at local national and supranational level in Polish steel industry, including biographical interviews with redundant steel workers.

Before, Vera has studied sociology, political science and East European Studies in Bochum, Toulouse, Berlin and Bielefeld. She graduated in 1999 with distinction in sociology at the University of Bielefeld, having done ethnography in Russia, working on the emergence of new social research institutions in Russia during the late 1990s. She also received a MA from Stanford University in Russian and East European Studies in 2001. Since then, she has worked in several comparative projects in the area of restructuring, industrial relations, labour policy and VET. Vera teaches classes on sociology of labour and employment, on European politics, and on political, economic, and social aspects of Europeanization and post-communist transition in particular. She also holds lectures in sociological theory and qualitative methods.

Currently her main research interest consists in developing a sociological understanding of European integration, linked to the fields of her own empirical research