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© Nikolas Golsch​/​TU Dortmund

Jun. Prof. Dr. Elena Beregow at the TU Dortmund University

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Portrait Jun.-Prof. Dr. Elena Beregow © © Fabian Strauch, UDE
Since April 2025, assistant professor Elena Beregow has been conducting research at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities at the University Alliance Ruhr. There, she is establishing the research group ‘Sweat: The Sociology of Sweating in a Warming World’ and investigating how modern ideals of coolness and distance are changing amid increasingly extreme heat waves and how heat exacerbates social inequalities.

Starting in October 2025, Jun.-Prof.-Dr. Elena Beregow will offer courses at the Department of Social Sciences at TU Dortmund University. In the winter semester of 2025/26, she will teach the courses ‘Sociological Theories’ and ‘Basic Literature of Sociology.’

In her research, she examines how the modern ideal of coolness and distance is changing in the face of increasingly extreme heat waves and what social tensions arise from new cooling technologies. From a sociological perspective, heat exacerbates existing inequalities, as different vulnerabilities and unequal accesses hit certain groups particularly hard. At the same time, the sweating body is historically linked to racist discourses, gender concepts and physical labour, and is taking on new meanings in wellness, sports and pop cultures.

We look forward to working with her and warmly welcome her to the Department of Social Sciences.

Stations in research and teaching

Previously, she researched and taught at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich and at the University of Hamburg, where she wrote her dissertation on thermal figures in sociological thinking. For this work, she received the 2022 Dissertation Award from the Sociological Theory Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS). She is also co-editor of the journal Pop. Kultur und Kritik and was, among other things, a visiting research fellow at the Siegen Collaborative Research Centre ‘Transformations of the Popular’.

On the homepage of the UA Ruhr you will find an announcement about the new appointment as well as further information about the research group.

 

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