Prof. Dr. Gert Pickel is Professor of Sociology of Religion and Church sociology at the Institute for Practical Theology, at the Faculty of Theology of the Leipzig University. His main focus is on the sociology of religion, democracy and political culture research. He is currently working on a German-Swiss project on the topic of religious and political collective identities as well as questions of modern populism in Europe, with a special focus on East Germany. Among other things, he is deputy spokesman of the Competence Centre for Research on Right-Wing Extremism and Democracy at the University of Leipzig, member of the board of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), member of the Center for the Study of Religion (CSR) at the University of Leipzig, member of the advisory board of the Academy of World Religions in Hamburg and of the Hannah Arendt Institute at the TU Dresden.