Helma Lutz, PhD

As a Sociology professor and chair of Women and Gender Studies at Goethe University, Helma Lutz has been the initiator and advisor of numerous gender and diversity activities at her school. She is associate executive director of the Cornelia Goethe Center of Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University. She is also the director of ‘IPP Transnational’, a program for the internationalization of the PhD program of the faculty of social sciences, and a co-director of  the Academy for Educational Research and Teachers’ Training. Lutz has also served as member of the team of deans for the faculty of social sciences (2009-11). 



Helma Lutz has a long standing record of research in the field of gender and migration studies and carried out projects in various locations in Europe. Lutz is one of Europe’s leading scholars in the field of the so-called ‘care crisis’ and ‘care migration’. Her work combines insights from gender and migration studies, two fields that are not always speaking to each other. She is currently working on a book titled The Care Curtain of Europe that looks at globalization of care work in its specific European representation. In Europe, migrant women from former socialist state countries in the East work as care providers in the South, the West and the North of Europe. Lutz investigates the features of this European divide – coinciding with the former iron curtain – by exploring the ‘care curtain’ as an expression of a new geo-political pattern characterized by drain in the East and gain in the West.



Helma Lutz has published 14 books as author and editor, more than a hundred articles in journals (Social Politics; Social Policy and Society, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Review, Gender, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies,  Migrantenstudies, Tijdschrift for Genderstudies, Forum Qualitative Research, etc.) and book chapters in edited books in four languages.