Academic Profile

Sabine is a Senior Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg. She was previously a GSO Leadership Fellow and held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2013-2015). Sabine is a board member of the FINGEO Network, the Global Network on Financial Geography, where she is also editor for the network’s working paper series. Sabine is also an editor of Articulo – Journal of Urban Research.

Sabine graduated from the Dresden University of Technology (Germany) and completed her doctorate (Economic Geography) at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Her thesis ‘Governance Forms of Global Value Chains in Tourism’ was awarded the best PhD thesis by the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation (DAVO) in 2009.

From 2004 to 2010 she was a lecturer at the Department of Human Geography at the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. She has also taught at the Universities of Bonn (D), Groningen (NL), Luxembourg (Lux) and Osnabruck (D). In 2010, Sabine took up the post of Research Fellow at the Centre for Population, Poverty and Public Policy Studies (CEPS/INSTEAD) in Luxembourg. In 2013, she moved to Oxford where, alongside her full-time fellowship, she was a visiting fellow at both the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the National University of Singapore in 2014.

Sabine’s academic work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Luxembourgish Research Foundation (FNR), ESPON, the European Commission (EC), and the Regional Studies Association (RSA), among others.

Outside academia, Sabine has worked as a consultant and academic expert for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation (BMZ), the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and for the Directorate General of Enterprise and Industry, EC.

Current Research

Sabine’s research interests include the changing global production and trade relations, primarily in financial and other services industries, and the dynamics of urban, financial and real estate development. Her research combines insights from economic geography, economics, political economy, and sociology.

Sabine is interested in developing alternative ways of analysing the global financial system, particularly the relational nature of complex local production systems of finance in the world’s leading financial centres. Related to this, she is interested in how these financial centres create economic resilience in the face of market discontinuities and political ruptures, and how shifts toward ‘sustainable finance’ and technological immersion affect financial activities and institutions. Sabine is a curious observer and critical commentator on the political economies of the world’s leading financial centres.