Elise Dermineur Reuterswärd Associate Professor

I am an Associate Professor of Economic History with a broad range of research interests, including the history of justice, economics, gender, and women’s history. I studied History at the Université de Strasbourg and received my Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2011. My doctoral dissertation, Women in Rural Society: Peasants, Patriarchy and the Local Economy in Northeast France, 1650–1789, examined the complex interplay between gender roles and economic structures in early modern rural communities.

Over the course of my career, I have held several fellowships. In 2011, I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2011 to 2013, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Umeå University, and between 2013 and 2015, I served as a Research Fellow at Lund University on the HERA-funded project “Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800.” I was also a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow from 2015 to 2022. Promoted to Associate Professor at Umeå University in 2016, I spent the 2018–2019 academic year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Since 2019, I have directed the Human Economy Lab, a research initiative that explores the connections between economic systems and social well-being.

My publications appear in Journal of Social History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Financial History Review, and Social Science History, among others. In 2017, I published Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden, a political biography of Queen Lovisa Ulrika (1720–1782). The following year, I released an open-access collection of essays, Women and Credit in Preindustrial Europe, and co-edited Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400–1800. In 2024, I have published together with Matteo Pompermaier the volume Credit Networks in the Preindustrial World.

My latest book, Before Banks, which examines early financial markets, was released in January 2025. I am currently also writing about the concept of the moral economy in modern societies, building on my broader commitment to understanding how community, social norms, and economic systems intersect over time.