Helena Hof

Helena Hof is Senior Research and Teaching Fellow in Social Science of Japan at the University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Japanese Studies. Simultaneously, she is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity. She is also a permanent visiting researcher at Waseda University’s Institute of Asian Migrations since 2020 and will be hosted by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, for her upcoming fieldwork.

Education
While explicit degree details are not provided in the supplied text, her academic trajectory shows sustained appointments at leading European and Asian institutes, indicating advanced doctoral training in sociology or migration studies.

Research Focus
Hof’s scholarship weaves together sociology of work, skilled and middle-class migration, gender, ethnicity & race, and entrepreneurship. Her current German-government-funded project “Foreign entrepreneurs in Tokyo’s and Singapore’s knowledge-intensive start-up sector” (within QuaMaFa) investigates how migrant-led innovation intersects with local entrepreneurial networks, professional incorporation, and broader societal embedding in two Asian global cities.

Publications Trajectory
Across 2020-2025 her work has clustered around three thematic pillars: (1) migrant class-making and racialised privilege in Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai; (2) temporal and existential dimensions of migrant staying and settlement; and (3) start-up ecosystems and foreign entrepreneurship as vectors of diversification and innovation.

Scientific Awards
No specific awards are listed in the provided text.

Advising & Grants

• Principal Investigator (PI), German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded sub-project within QuaMaFa consortium.
• Planned fieldwork: four multi-week ethnographic trips each to Tokyo (hosted by Waseda University) and Singapore (hosted by NUS Asia Research Institute).

Labs & Teams
She collaborates with the QuaMaFa international research network, the Max Planck Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, the Asia Migration Cluster (NUS), and Waseda University’s Institute of Asian Migrations, integrating qualitative ethnography, interviews, and quantitative surveys to capture the human dimension of migrant entrepreneurship.