Jonas Seufert Is MPIfG Journalist in Residence

The MPIfG’s new Journalist in Residence between October and November 2025 is Jonas Seufert, a member of the investigative team at FragDenStaat. Prior to 2025 Seufert worked for ten years as a freelance reporter for DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, ARD, ZDF, and CORRECTIV, among others. As a journalist, his work focuses on social inequality, precarious work, and global supply chains, often taking him undercover – including as a parcel delivery driver for Amazon or in agriculture. At the MPIfG he will be exploring the question of how much wealth is fair, the mechanisms that reproduce extreme wealth inequality, how wealth is passed on across generations, and to what extent wealthy individuals influence political decisions through trade associations and foundations. Seufert has received several accolades for his investigative work, including the 2019 Grimme Online Award for the citizen investigation “Wem gehört Hamburg?” (Who Owns Hamburg?), the German-Polish Journalism Award, and the Civis Podcast Prize. In 2023/24 he was Journalist in Residence at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. The MPIfG’s Journalist in Residence Fellowship is an opportunity for media professionals to pursue a research project of their choice in direct contact with academia. The aim is to strengthen knowledge transfer between the social sciences and society and to promote coverage of sociopolitical issues in the press and media.