Bielefeld University Gabriele Rosenthal (born 19 April 1954 in Schwenningen am Neckar, Germany) is a German sociologist and head of Department for Qualitative Methods of the Center for Methods in Social Sciences (Methodenzentrum Sozialwissenschaften) of the University of Göttingen, Germany.
She is known for systemizing the influences of the Gestalt theory (Aron Gurwitsch and Kurt Koffka), the sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Alfred Schütz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger), and the sociology of figurations and processes (Norbert Elias) to explain the interrelationship between experience, memory and narrative, as well as how social figurations intertwine with individual biographies.
From 2002 until 2010, Gabriele Rosenthal was the President of the Research Committee 38 “Biography and Society” of the International Sociological Association (ISA).
She approaches current social problems such as the impacts of violence, war, enslavement and forced migration through transnational research, using comparative case reconstructions (on the levels of biography, family, and milieu).
Gabriele Rosenthal has conducted research in Israel, Palestine, Florida (USA), Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Ghana, Jordan, the Spanish enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla), and Brazil.