photo credit: Marzena Skubatz

Isabella M. Weber is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. Her next book, ESSENTIAL: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, will be published in 2026 by Penguin Allen Lane in the UK and University of Chicago Press in the US, and will be translated into seven languages. 

Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize, the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award and the Keynes Price and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others. The book has been translated into five languages. Isabella has become a leading voice on policy responses to inflation and has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization. For her public policy work she has been profiled in the New Yorker, recognized as one of TIME100 Next, Bloomberg's 50 Ones to Watch, Germany's 100 women of 2022 and Capital 40 under 40 and has been awarded the Kurt Rothschild Prize and the 2024 Hans-Matthöfer Prize. For her work on China’s market reforms she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Isabella is an Open Society Foundations Ideas Fellow.

Her writings have appeared the Washington Post, the Guardian, Project Syndicate and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Keynesian Economics, the Review of Political Economy and on the advisory board of Environment and Planning A and a member of the Program Committee of the International Economics Association World Congress. Previously she was a tenured Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.