Sciences Po Logo

Centre for the Sociology of Organisations

Home>Sarah Gensburger

Sarah Gensburger

CNRS Research Professor, HDR

Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO)

Research Interest(s): Expertise, Genocides, Memory, Public Administration, Symbolic Policies, Work, Terrorism, Values, Citizenship

Discipline(s): Sociology, History, Political Science

Research Group(s): Public Policy and Transformations of the State; Work, Employment and Professions; Knowledge, Science and Expertise Program

Biography

The current work of Sarah Gensburger focuses on public action and the transformation of the state through the study of public policies in the field of memory. She is particularly interested in the interactions between bureaucracy, normativity and expertise in the mobilization of the past in contemporary society. Upstream, the aim is to study the emergence and functioning of memory administrations, their networks of experts and their professionals in order to understand the contemporary transformations of the welfare state. Downstream, Sarah Gensburger explore new methodologies in order to break with an approach centered on the study of the narratives of the past, which is at the heart of most international work on memory, and to shift the focus from the effectiveness of a transmission of the past to the relationship of citizens to the very principle of these policies of memory and their policy feedbacks. This approach allows us to pay attention to the relationship between public action and normativity, on the one hand, and to the role played by socio-economic inequalities in a public policy sector that nevertheless puts forward the universality of its audiences and its emancipatory goals, on the other.

The second group of research that Sarah Gensburger have been conducting is more sociological and concerns the social and institutional frameworks of documentality that
mark the contemporary period and the transformation of cultural and heritage institutions that accompany it. In recent years, calls for "participation" by the "public" in order to preserve, in the present and "for the future", the traces of the past have multiplied. Her most recent research has focused on the ways in which people keep track of and document periods of crisis (World War II, terrorist attacks and Covid), and the way State and administrations have taken growingly us these "participatory archives" as a tool for the governance of crises and transitions. Since 2022, She has been working on these issues in the environmental field.

Finally, Sarah Gensburger is also a historian of the Holocaust and a specialist in the implementation of anti-Semitic persecutions in Paris, which she studies on a micro-historical scale and from a spatial perspective.

EDUCATION

2019
Habilitation in political science, Sciences Po Paris

2006
Phd in sociology, EHESS

MA in Sciences Po Paris (2001), Agrégation in Economy and Social Sciences (1999)
et École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (1996-2000)

Visiting Professorships 

Spring 2026
Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence, USC Dorsnife

November 2025
Visiting professor, Berkeley University, Center for Jewish Studies

October 2025
Visiting professor, University of Stirling, Center for the Sciences of Place and Memory

March to May 2019
Visiting professor, New York University, Institute for French Studies
 

Projects

Teaching

2026-2027
Les politiques publiques du passé, École d’Affaires Publiques de Sciences Po

2023-2024
Enquête collective, Master de sociologie de Sciences Po

2022-2024
La Shoah à Paris : nouvelles approches, Bachelor de Sciences Po

AWARDS

2025

  • Joseph and Eda Pell Endowed Lecture, Berkeley University,
  • Albertine Translation Prize, 2025

2019
Médaille de bronze du CNRS

2017
PEN-Foundation French Voices Award

2007

  • Prix de thèse de l'Association Française de Science Politique
  • Accessit au Prix de thèse de la Fondation Auschwitz

Editorial Activity

publications

  • Appartements témoins. La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris, 1940-1946, La Découverte, 2025, avec Isabelle Backouche et Eric Le Bourhis, version anglaise à paraître en 2027 chez Rutgers University Press, lauréat de l’Albertine Translation Grant, 2025
  • « Au-delà de la concurrence des mémoires. Une réanalyse de l’enquête baromètre “racisme” 2021 du CNCDH », avec Benoit Tudoux, Revue française de Science Politique, 2024/2 (Vol.74), 197-226
  • « Les archives du Web et la pandémie de Covid-19 : entre logiques institutionnelles et initiatives personnelles », avec Louis Gabrysiak et Marta Severo, Bulletin des Bibliothèques
    de France, janvier 2025, 1-9.
  • The Covid-19 Pandemic and Memory. Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis avec Orli Fridman (dir.), New York, Palgrave, 2024
  • Is artificial intelligence the future of collective memory ?, numéro special de Memory Studies Review, co-dirigé avec Frédéric Clavert, 2024/2, open access
  • « Collecting traces of the world outside: digital heritage of the COVID-19 lockdown », avec Marta Severo, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2024, on-line first.
  • De-Commemoration. Removing statues and renaming streets, avec Jenny Wustenberg (dir.), New York, Berghahn Books, 2023. Traduction augmentée de dix nouveaux textes, en français, sous le titre Dé-commémoration. Quand le monde déboulonne et change les noms de rues,
    Paris, Fayard, 2023.
  • Qui pose les questions mémorielles ? Approche sociologique, CNRS Editions, 2023.
  • La mémoire collective en question(s), PUF, 2023, avec Sandrine Lefranc (dir.).
  • Persécution des juifs et espace urbain (Paris 1940-1946), numéro spécial d’Histoire Urbaine, co-dirigé avec Isabelle Backouche et Eric Le Bourhis, 2022/1, n°62.
  • « Collective memory and Autobiographical memory: perspectives from the humanities and cognitive sciences », avec Lucrèce Heux, Clare Rathbone, Rebecca Clifford et Céline Souchay, WIREs Cognitive Science, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1635 
  • Beyond Memory. Can we really learn from the past?, London, Palgrave, 2020, avec S. Lefranc, traduit en français, espagnol et en arabe.
  • Les Mémoriaux du 13 Novembre, Paris, Ed. de l’EHESS, 2020, avec Gérôme Truc (dir.).
  • Memory on my doorstep. Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris, 2015-2016), Leuven University Press, 2019, traduction augmentee de la version française 2017, Anamosa.
  • Administrations of Memory, special issue de International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, n°2, 2019, co-dirigé avec Sara Dybris McQuaid.

Recent large audience publication

More Information