The Interviewing and Oral History Working Group hosts a presentation by Associate Professor Izabela Wagner, Collegium Civitas Cooperative University.
Based on over 25 years of research experience, including more than 500 interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals/academics, and refugees (in five different languages, often adopting an ethnographic approach), Izabela Wagner will show how the sociological approach and its methodologies can be applied to the practice of oral history.
In 1996, after working as a music teacher in Poland, Dr. Izabela Wagner enrolled in the sociology doctoral program jointly offered by the Ecole Normale Superieur, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and University of Paris 8, where she defended her PhD thesis in 2006 on the subject of music virtuosi. This formed the basis of her book Producing Excellence. Making of a Virtuoso published by Rutgers UP in 2015. From 2003 to 2016, Dr. Wagner conducted further ethnographic research focusing on academic careers (mainly life-science specialists), and in 2011 her findings were published in Becoming a Transnational Professional. More recently, she has been studying, among other topics, the role of music, dance, theatre, and film in the process of refugee hosting. In 2020 Dr. Wagner also published the first comprehensive biography of Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman entitled Bauman: a Biography (Polity, 2020).
Izabela Wagner is currently an associate professor at the Institute of Sociology, at Collegium Civitas Cooperative University in Warsaw, Poland and a fellow at the Institute Convergence Migration in Paris. Previously Dr. Wagner has held various roles in the Harvard University's Department of the History of Science; the New School for Social Research in NYC; Fudan University in Shanghai; Minho University in Portugal. She received her alma mater at EHESS in Paris and previous studies from Italy's Sapienza and Cagliari universities. Nowadays, Dr. Wagner lives with her family on their farm in Sardinia, Italy, along with 2 horses, 5 dogs and 5 cats.