Academic Resource

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Academic Profile

Sabine Dörry is a Senior Research Scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and teaches at the Universities of Luxembourg and Bonn. Her work explores how financial systems, urban development, and sustainability intersect, and how these forces shape places and economies.

Sabine was recently invited as an IÖR Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IÖR) in Dresden, where she worked on bridging financial geography with ecological transformation research — fostering dialogue between sustainable finance and spatial development.

A former Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, Sabine is a founding member of the Global Network on Financial Geography FINGEO and serves as editor of Competition & Change and Articulo – Journal of Urban Research.

She earned her PhD in Economic Geography from Goethe University Frankfurt, where her award-winning thesis examined global value chains in tourism. Her research has since been supported by leading institutions such as the DFG, FNR, ESPON, and the European Commission.

Alongside her academic work, Sabine frequently collaborates with international organisations and policy bodies, including the UNWTO, ILO, BMZ, and the European Commission. In Luxembourg, she is an appointed member and President of Luxembourg's Climate Policy Observatory (OPC) and previosuly served on the Scientific Advisory Board on climate and environmental practices at Spuerkeess.

Current Research

Sabine’s research explores how finance, cities, and sustainability intersect in an increasingly interconnected world. She investigates how global production and trade networks — especially in financial and service industries — evolve amid economic, political, and technological change.

At the heart of her current work is a rethinking of global finance: probing the local systems that support major financial centres, studying how they adapt to shocks, and tracing how shifts toward sustainable finance and digital innovation are reshaping them. She also examines the negotiation, power dynamics, and resistance that often stall real transformation — showing how entrenched structures can block deeper systems change.

Her latest book, Future Finance: Legal Geographies of Financial Centres and the Asset Economy (2025), digs into how global financial hubs really work — and how their legal, institutional and territorial entanglements ripple through economies and societies. Drawing on law, political economy, sociology and geography, the book offers a fresh lens on what finance might — or must — become in the decades ahead.

Recent media coverage includes articles, podcasts and briefs featured at InfoGreen.lu, SpacEconomics, Delano and others.

Teaching / Supervision

Current Graduate Research Students

• Brian LONGOBARDI