Andrea Rehling was between 2013 and 2016 principal investigator for the research project "Knowledge of the World – Heritage of Mankind: The History of UNESCO World Cultural and Natural Heritage" funded by the Competition of the Leibniz Association under funding line 2: Particularly innovative and high-risk projects. She studied History, Political Science and German Literature at the Ruhr University, Bochum. In 2009, she took her doctoral degree with a thesis on German corporatism between 1880 and 1980 at the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim and a junior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Constance (Konstanz). In 2016 and 2017 she was visiting fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies in Basel, Switzerland. Since February 2018 Andrea Rehling is center manager of the Jakob-Fugger-Zentrum at the University of Augsburg.

Andrea Rehling is a historian of Contemporary History and focuses on the global and transnational history of the 20th century, especially with regard to international relations and international organizations. She is interested in the history of ideas and agency, industrial and labor relations, cultural and environmental history.