Johanna Gautier Morin is a world historian of modern finance, specializing in the transnational circulations of economic ideas in the Global South. Her work is at the crossroads of world history, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism and empire in a global perspective, with a strong interdisciplinary engagement with the social sciences and economics. Her broader research interests include gender, environmental, and digital history. 
 

Her PhD dissertation, Black Monday: The Acid Test for Global Financial Deregulation: A Socio-History of the October 1987 Crash, focused on a 48-hour global event to observe the legal, technological, and sociological transformations of the financial world since the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreements through a transnational perspective in the 23 countries hit by the 1987 crash. Most narratives about this event adopt a Western-centered approach and focus on internal causalities. Her thesis offered a new interpretation of the global transformation of stock markets as an anthropological phenomenon and considered the 1987 crash as the first global event of the digital age that inaugurated a new era of modern finance. 
 

Along with her doctoral research, she has been focusing on the circulation and diffusion of economic ideas. She published her first paper on the popularization of Keynesian and monetarist ideas on television shows hosted by prominent economists in The Tocqueville Review (2019). She later worked on the involvement of economic thinkers in authoritarian regimes (Global Networks, 2020), and the convergence of economic beliefs and knowledge between the Mexican government and IMF experts during the Mexican default debt crisis in the 1980s (Routledge, 2021). In the same vein, the postdoctoral research she conducts in the ERC-team ECOINT at the European University Institute aims to understand how pioneering economic ideas emerged, circulated, and turned into policies in international organizations throughout the twentieth century. 
 

Since the emergence of Economics as a discipline, ethnocentricism has plagued the production of economic knowledge and modeling, while marginalizing or negating lived experience that does not fit a universal “Economic Man.” Her study on the contribution of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to economic debates about development, globalization, and economic integration deals with the international economic thinkers who produced theories that took into account the socio-economic reality of women and non-Western populations in the world economic system. She focuses specifically on the participation of Japanese experts to ECLAC and the discussions about development models from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and later China in Latin America. This project nurtures a discussion about methodological cosmopolitism and the making of international economic thinking. A co-authored publication with Elisa Klüger (CEBRAP) and Thierry Rossier (London School of Economics) on the creation of the first graduate school of economic studies in Latin America is forthcoming. 
 

As part of ECOINT focus on women international economic thinkers, she also explores the difficulties of implementing new economic topics and models and how some minority groups lobbied their ideas in international organizations to transform global standards. With Maylis Avaro (UPenn) and Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche (Cambridge University), she is working on feminist economists from India, Spain, New Zealand, and the United States, whose contributions profoundly influenced debates on women’s unpaid work – a problem that has led to severe biases in national censuses and economic models. This work in intellectual history and the history of economic thought will be developed in an article and a book chapter in the coming months.