Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Mischa Suter is full professor of social and cultural history, 19th to 20th centuries.

Mischa Suter’s work is located at the intersection of historical anthropology, social history, and critical theory. He studies the history of capitalism, in particular money and debt as social relations, and the history of the human sciences, with an emphasis on the psychological disciplines.

Trained as a historian of modern Europe, his previous work dealt with the question of what a cultural history of economic life might look like. His first monograph, Rechtstrieb, (published in 2016 in German; translated into English in 2021 and into Chinese in 2025) examined everyday indebtedness in nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. His second book, Geld an der Grenze (2024) traced conflicts over money as a societal medium in the period imperialism, 1871-1923.

Currently, he is inquiring how the human psyche became a site for political and epistemic controversies at the end of colonial rule. In that context, he is completing his third monograph, tentatively titled “Psychoanalysis and Decolonization: Travels and Transference from West Africa to Western Europe in the Sixties”.
He is involved in collaborative projects that aim to rethink social history for our present moment. With colleagues, he has edited publications on body history, economic knowledge, and global economic dependencies, among other topics.

Before moving to Vienna, he was a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. In fall 2025, he was a fellow at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies and in spring 2026 a senior fellow at the Collegium Helveticum at ETH Zurich. He taught at the universities of Basel and Zurich and had scholarships at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, Humboldt University Berlin, Duke University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan.

Areas of Research

• Cultural history of the social
• History of capitalism
• History of the psychological disciplines
• Colonialism and decolonization
• History and social theory

 Activities and Networks 

• Editorial board, Historische Anthropologie.
• Fall 2026- : Member of the Evaluation Panel Humanities, “Project Funding”, Swiss National Science Foundation.
• 2021-2026: Principal Investigator of SNSF Eccellenza Project “Decolonizing the Psyche: The Politics of Ethnopsychology, 1930–1980”.

 
Selected Publications 

Books

• Geld an der Grenze. Souveränität und Wertmaßstäbe im Imperialismus 1871–1923, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2024.
• Rechtstrieb – Schulden und Vollstreckung im liberalen Kapitalismus 1800–1900, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2016 
  - Translated as: Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism: Switzerland, 1800-1900, transl. A. Bresnahan, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021 (in the series “Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany”).
  - Chinese translation: 自由资本主义的破产和债务催收——以19世纪的瑞士为例, China Science and Technology Press.
• With Peter Paul Bänziger (eds.): Histories of Productivity: Genealogical Perspectives on the Body and Modern Economy, London/New York: Routledge, 2016.

Selected Journal Articles

• “Psychoanalysis in 1960s West Africa: Universality and Particularity at the End of Empire”, Journal of Modern History 98 (2026), no. 4.
• With Matthias Ruoss: “Von der Kapitalismusgeschichte zur historischen Kritik der politischen Ökonomie”, Historische Anthropologie 34 (2026), no. 1.
• “Koloniale Währungen: Medium der Macht”, Merkur 887 (April, 2023), 32–43.
• “Pathologien der Freiheit: Fanon und die Psychiatrie", Soziopolis.de (November, 2021)
• “Moral Economy as a Site of Conflict: Debates on Debt, Money, and Usury in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century”, Geschichte & Gesellschaft, special issue 26: “Moral Economies”, edited by Ute Frevert (2019), 75–101.
• “Usury and the Problem of Exchange under Capitalism: a Late-Nineteenth-Century Debate on Economic Rationality”, Social History 42, 4 (2017), 501–523.
• “Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 3 (2017), 715–742.
• “Das Wissen der Schulden: Recht, Kulturtechniken und Alltagserfahrung im liberalen Kapitalismus”, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 37, 2 (2014), 148–164.
• “A Thorn in the Side of Social History: Jacques Rancière and Les Révoltes logiques”, International Review of Social History 57, 1 (2012), 61–85.
• “Jenseits des ‘cash nexus’. Sozialgeschichte des Kredits zwischen kulturanthropologischen und informationsökonomischen Zugängen”, WerkstattGeschichte 53 (2009), 89–99.