Matthias vom Hau

Matthias vom Hau (PhD in Sociology, Brown University) is an Associate Professor at IBEI. His research is centrally concerned with the relationship between ethnic politics, nationalism, and state formation in the non-European world, with a special focus on Latin America. He has published widely on how states construct a sense of national belonging, how civil society actors negotiate and contest official nationalisms, and the extent to which ordinary citizens subscribe to official and counter-state identity projects. In his most recent line of work, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, he challenges the supposedly negative relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision and instead advances a case for analyzing ethnic heterogeneity and public goods provision over time, by treating both as endogenous to macro-historical processes of nation-building and state institutional development. His work has appeared in Theory and Society, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Political Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Nations and Nationalism.