Biography
Francesca Mele is a Kohli Fellow for Sociology in the Max Weber Postdoctoral Program. Previously, she was a scientific collaborator at the University of Potsdam. She received her PhD in Sociology in 2025 from the University of Zürich, where she was a doctoral research associate at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development. She was also a visiting researcher at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and a doctoral fellow of the “International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE)”. Prior to that, she completed an MPhil in Education at the University of Cambridge and studied Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna.
Francesca is a sociologist with a strong interdisciplinary interest. Employing mostly longitudinal quantitative methods, she analyses multiple birth cohort studies from different countries to understand how psychological, social, and institutional factors, and their interplay, shape educational opportunities and later life chances. Her research appeared in journals such as the Journal of Youth and Adolescence or Social Forces. Additionally, she taught seminars in life course research and sociology of education, and supervised at the undergraduate level.
At the EUI, Francesca will expand her work on how individual’s behaviours, attitudes, and orientations contribute to the reproduction of social inequality to examine the role of micro-interactions in school involving families, their children, and educators (“interactional cultural capital”) in shaping educational and life-course opportunities.