In Memoriam Cornelia Staritz
in cooperation with ÖFSE

We kindly ask you to register for the Public Lecture here:
Isabella Weber: Economics in a Global Perspective | Politik | Die Wiener Volkshochschulen

We are happy to announce Professor Isabella Weber as the eleventh Vienna Karl Polanyi Visiting Professor for the summer term 2026. Her public lecture will be about “Economics in a Global Perspective”

Isabella Weber is associate professor for economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. She has published extensively on inflation, China, global trade and the history of economics. Her next book will be on “ESSENTIAL: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies”. Her key research interest is on the impacts of rising prices of essential goods like food, housing, and energy on costs of living, profits, inequality and development policies.

She has gained broad public attention beyond academia for proposing a gas price gap during the energy crisis of 2022. Weber has served as an expert for the U.S. Congress, as an advisor to the German government, and as a member of various expert commissions, including the Gas Price Commission of the German Ministry of Climate and the Expert Commission on the Debt Brake of the German Ministry of Finance.

As an economist she is committed to interdisciplinary research in the tradition of political economy. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that, following the election of Donald Trump in 2024, she proposed an anti-fascist economics to counter current anti-democratic, violent and inegalitarian politics. She insists that inflation and austerity policies can be catalysts of far-right politics, as wrong economic policies can facilitate the rise of new forms of fascism.