Izabela Wagner (Ph.D. with habilitation) is 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, as well as associate researcher at DynamE – Dynamiques Européennes L’UMR7367 – CNRS – Université de Strasbourg (dyname.unistra.fr/membres/autres-chercheurs/chercheurs-affilies/chercheure-affiliee-wagner-izabela).

In 1996, after working as a music teacher (MA in pedagogy of music from the Academy of Music in Poznan, Poland) 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.

In 2006 she defended her PhD thesis (on ethnography of music virtuoso world) and pursued her study of creative careers in the context of international elite circles. From 2003 to 2016 Wagner conducted ethnographic research focusing on academic careers (mainly life-science specialists).

Since 2016 Wagner has also been investigating the refugee phenomenon (work in progress). One of the topics in this field concerns the role of the arts (music, dance, theater, film) in the process of refugee hosting.

In 2010-2011 Wagner was a post-doc in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and in 2016 at the New School for Social Research in NYC.

Wagner was also a visiting professor: at the Fudan University in Shanghai (China) in 2010, Minho University (Portugal) in 2013 and 2014; Cagliari University (Italy) in 2015,  EHESS in Paris in 2017 and in 2020 – at Sapienza (Italy) in the department of Social Psychology.

Wagner is the author of “Producing Excellence. Making of a Virtuoso” (Rutgers UP, 2015) – the book was translated into Chinese (⾳音乐神童加⼯工⼚厂, published by Normal University in Shanghai in 2016) and Russian (Создание виртуозов. Через тернии к звездам: как рождаются виртуозы; published by Exmo, Moscow in 2019) and “Becoming Transnational Professional. Kariery i mobilność polskich elit naukowych.” (Scholar, 2011). She has also written several articles about the work conditions, the construction of careers and international mobility of creative professionals. In 2020 Wagner published the first comprehensive biography of Zygmunt Bauman – “Bauman: a Biography” (Polity, 2020).