After taking her degree in history and sociology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Sandra Maß undertook doctoral studies at the European University Institute in Florence , completing them in 2004 with a thesis on the history of colonial masculinity in Germany (published 2006 by Böhlau).

During her time as a researcher in the History of the Political department at Bielefeld University , between 2004 and 2011, she worked on a study on monetary education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (published November 2017), with which she gained her Habilitation in 2014.

In 2015, after a period deputising a professorship at the University of Cologne, she took up the position of deputy director at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, a post she held until 2017.

Her principal research interests relate to the history of Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cultural history of the economy, the history of childhood, and European colonial history.

Sandra Maß has been co-editor of L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft since 2007 and took on the editor-in-chief function, alongside Prof. Christa Hämmerle, Prof. Claudia Kraft and Prof. Claudia Opitz, in 2018. She joined the selection committee of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in 2016.