Elżbieta Hałas - studied philosophy, social sciences and Romance studies at the Catholic University of Lublin from 1973 to 1978. She received her master's degree in philosophy in 1978. She received her doctorate in sociology in 1986 at the reactivated Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lublin. She was habilitated in 1993 at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lublin. In 1994-2003, she was head of the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of Lublin. She received the title of Professor of Humanities in 2003 at the request of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw.
Since October 1, 2003, she has worked at the University of Warsaw, where she became a full professor in 2008. From 2008 to 2020, she headed the Department of Cultural Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw. In 2020, she established the Center for Relational Analysis of Culture and Society at the UW Department of Sociology.
She was a winner of the Subsidies for Scientists - Master Program of the Foundation for Polish Science (1998-2001).
She has conducted research at foreign centers, receiving fellowships from: Zentrum für Interdisciplinäre Forschung (Bielefeld); KU Leuven; European University Institute (Florence); University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Fulbright Fellowship); University of Georgia at Athens (American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship); Center for Social Sciences, Columbia University; Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM in Vienna); John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin). Alma Mater Studiorum. Università do Bologna (NAWA grant); École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris (NAWA grant).
In 2001, she created and edits the book series Studies in Sociology: Symbols, Theory and Society (Peter Lang).
Since 1993 she has been a member of the Council of the Florian Znaniecki Scientific Foundation.
She served two terms as a member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association (1999-2003).
She was a member of the Council for Scientific Excellence for the first term (2019-2023).
She is a member of the Committee of Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Research interests
She combines analytical and systemic approaches in the field of humanistic sociology with the interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, cultural anthropology, cultural semiotics, linguistics and discourse analysis. It deals with the social context of meanings and symbolic-interactional and relational analyses of socio-cultural processes. She develops the sociology of symbolic processes, research on the politics of symbolization and collective memory. In the analyses of contemporary transformations of social meaning systems and axionormative orders, she refers to the achievements of cultural sociology, sociology of knowledge and sociology of religion.
She combines research in the area of theoretical sociology with the history of sociological thought and the history of ideas. She places the development of the relational paradigm in the cultural sciences and the development of relational sociology at the center of her interests.
She deals with the interpretation of the scientific legacy of Florian Znaniecki and its significance for the development of cultural sciences.