Fenella Fleischmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and leader of the AISSR programme group Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses. Before her appointment, she held positions as Associate and Assistant Professor at Utrecht University's Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science and was a researcher at the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations, after working as senior reseacher at the Berlin Social Science Research Centre in the research group Migration, Integration, Transnationalisation. She obtained her PhD from Utrecht University and the University of Leuven for the dissertation 'Second-generation Muslims in European societies: Comparative Perspectives on Education and Religion'. 

Her research is situated in the field of migration studies and addresses the questions of how immigrants fare in their new society. Frequently applying a comparative perspecive, she studies how migrant communities and destination countries differ in integration processes and outcomes, and how such differences can be explained from different theoretical perspectives. More specifially, she focuses on the role of religion and identity and their intersection with socio-economic status for immigrants’ engagement in and sense of belonging to their new country.

In 2022, Fenella Fleischmann was awarded a Vidi grant by the Dutch Research Council for the 5-year project The role of religious cognition for immigrant integration (RECOGNITION). In this research project, she will develop cross-culturally comparable measures of religious cognition and religiosity for three religious minority groups, together with her team. They will subsequently assess how religious cognitions and religiosity contribute to explaining different dimensions of immigrant integration.