Dr. Léa Renard

Sociology of Knowledge | Historical Sociology | Sociology of Colonialism | Sociology of Work | Gender Sociology

Léa Renard is a habilitation candidate at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Heidelberg University. In her habilitation thesis, she explores practices of knowledge mediation and inquiry in the 20th century. She is currently Early Career Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Weber-Institute of Sociology (Chair for Empirical Macrosociology) and in the DFG-funded project "Forced labour as a shifting global category" at the Institute for Latin American Studies, FU Berlin. She holds a binational PhD degree from the University of Potsdam and Université Grenoble Alpes (2019). Her research interests lie in the historical sociology of knowledge production. 

She is co-investigator of the DFG-funded Scientific Network "Global Cultures of Enquête: Towards a Praxeology of Surveying (17th–21st Century)" (together with Martin Herrnstadt, University of Bremen).

Cissé, C., Lacroix, A., Mollard, B., Piguet, L., & Renard, L. (2025). Counting Work and Workers in Africa: Introduction to the Special Issue, International Labor and Working-Class History (FirstView) 

Wobbe, T., Renard, L., & Braig, M. (Eds.). (2025). Sklaverei, Freiheit und Arbeit: Soziohistorische Beiträge zur Rekonfiguration von Zwangsarbeit. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. 

Herrnstadt, M., & Renard, L. (Eds.). (2025). Cultures globales de l'enquête / Globale Enquêtenkulturen, A Propos. Deutsch-Französische Forschungen für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, 1. 

Schalkowski, N., & Renard, L. (2023). Estimating forced labour: from a legal category to a statistical category for international political campaigns, International Review of Sociology, 33(3), 587-610. 

Wobbe, T., Renard, L., Schalkowski, N., & Braig, M. (2023). Deutungsmodelle von Arbeit im Spiegel kolonialer und geschlechtlicher Dimensionen: Kategorisierungsprozesse von „Zwangsarbeit“ während der Zwischenkriegszeit, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 52(2), 172-190. 

Renard, L., & Stricker, Y. (2023). A gathering of ‘technical theorists’? Situating the ISI within the field of international statistics through the prism of the migration debates (1887–1938), European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 30(1), 53-72. 

Renard, L. (2021). Vergleichsverbot? Bevölkerungsstatistiken und die Frage der Vergleichbarkeit in den deutschen Kolonien (1885-1914), Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 73 (Suppl 1), 169-194.

Berrebi-Hoffmann, I., Giraud, O., Renard, L., & Wobbe, T. (Eds.) (2019). Categories in Context. Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900-Present. Berghahn Books. 

Renard, L. (2018). Mit den Augen der Statistiker: Deutsche Kategorisierungspraktiken von Migration im historischen Wandel, Zeithistorische Forschungen, 15(3), 431-451. 

Wobbe, T, & Renard, L. (2017). The Category of ‘Family Workers’ in International Labour Organization Statistics (1930-1980s): A Contribution to the Study of Globalized Gendered Boundaries between Household and Market, Journal of Global History, 12, 340-360.