Friederike M. Windel is a doctoral candidate in Critical Social/Personality Psychology at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY), and an advising fellow in the MALS program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she provides personalized academic support to MALS students. She’s also a research affiliate with Mindscapes and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, which organizes public programming with a focus on mental health and wellbeing in public spaces.

Growing up in Germany, Friederike moved to the USA for college and has since explored questions about belonging, exclusion, whiteness, nationalism, and home. Friederike received an M.Phil. and an M.A. in Critical Social/Personality Psychology from the Graduate Center and a B.A. in psychology and social science from Bennington College. She has taught psychology and interdisciplinary courses at various CUNY colleges. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Friederike worked as an international student and first-year advisor. 

Her scholarship examines constructions of whiteness, national belonging, exclusion, and affect in Germany. Her M.A project integrated these interests by examining how white German volunteers discursively construct refugees and themselves. Currently, Friederike is working on her dissertation that combines computational social science and Discourse Analysis to examine the affective and embodied technologies of whiteness in Germany through Twitter research and focus groups. As a member of the New Media Lab and the caretLab, she is part of conversations and research that center on interdisciplinary studies, computational social science, and digital humanities. Her work has been published in Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Critical Discourse Studies, Frontiers in Sociology, and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities(IDEAH).