Izabela Wagner

(born 1964) – professor of sociology at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, graduate of the University of Music in Poznań. Her academic interests are centred around group and individual biographies, with particular regard to migration trajectories. She did her research work in biological laboratories in France, Italy, Poland and the USA in 2003–2016. She defended her PhD dissertation in sociology at L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 2006. As a member of the GETI research group specialising in the sociology of the Chicago tradition and ethnographic research (École normale supérieure, EHESS and Université Paris 8), she focused on research and careers in artistic and scientific circles: initially virtuoso musicians and laboratory scientists and then sociologists – the latter became the basis of a habilitation degree earned at the University of Warsaw in 2012. She has been a visiting researcher and professor at many renowned universities, including the New School for Social Research in New York, Harvard University in Cambridge, Fudan University in Shanghai, La Sapienza in Rome and Minho in Braga, EHESS in Paris and the University of Strasbourg. She also works as a researcher at the Institute Convergence Migration in Paris and the DynamE – Dynamiques Européennes laboratory functioning within the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (L’UMR7367). She is the author of many articles on the education, working conditions and international mobility of “creative professionals” and the book Producing Excellence. The Making of a Virtuosos (2015), which was also published in Chinese (2016) and Russian (2019). In Poland, she published a volume Becoming Transnational Professional. Kariery i mobilność polskich elit naukowych [Becoming Transnational Professional. The Careers and Mobility of Polish Scientific Elites] (2011). Since 2016, she has lived and worked in Sardinia, where she started working as a volunteer in a refugee camp, which she treats as her research area, and her main interest has been the role of art in the process of inclusion of refugees in the life of receiving societies. Since 2019, she has published texts on refugees. In 2020, she published in English the first fundamental biography of Zygmunt Bauman entitled Bauman: A Biography, issued by the prestigious British publishing house Polity (2020). The book came out also in Portuguese (2020) and Polish (2021), and Spanish, Korean and Chinese translations are under preparation.