New Fellow: Cornelius Heimstädt

29 September 2025

Photo: Cornelius Heimstädt

Cornelius Heimstädt is a sociologist whose research lies at the intersection of economic sociology, environmental sociology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). His work focuses on how start-ups and venture capital firms engage with questions of sustainability. He earned his doctorate at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at MINES Paris – PSL, and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Department of Agricultural and Food Policy and at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). In these projects, he examined how so-called “agtech” start-ups transform agricultural markets and societal conceptions of sustainability. He is currently co-editing a special issue of Valuation Studies entitled Valuing Sustainability, which proposes an approach to studying sustainability grounded in pragmatist sociology and anthropology of valuation. At the University of Hamburg, Heimstädt leads the DFG-funded project The climatization of venture capital: Transformations of financial expertise, valuation, and performances, which investigates the emerging field of “climate venture capital” in Germany.