Susanne Schmidt is a historian of science and SNSF Professor in the Department of History at the University of Basel. Her research approaches the history of science from social, political, and global perspectives, with particular interests in the history of gender, race, education, and social movements. Recurring concerns include the interface between science and the public; questions of communication and reception; and the structure of knowledge itself—its hierarchies, exclusions, and conflicts. Her work centers on the United States and the Caribbean, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Her book Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché (University of Chicago Press, 2020) offers the first historical study of this contested concept, which emerged as a feminist idea in the United States in the 1970s before psychologists and psychiatrists redefined it. A second strand of her work examines how the human sciences shaped modern ideas of motherhood, child development, and the family, casting women as the "environment" in which others develop, and entrenching gendered and racialized norms. This work has appeared in Isis and N.T.M.: Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. She is now working on a history of the marshmallow test and delayed gratification. You can learn more about this project in this interview.

Susanne received her Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge in 2018. She held research and teaching positions in Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin (2018–20) and in History of Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2020–25), and fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford Universities, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, University of Oxford, and Georgetown University and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.

For her research, Susanne received the first-book and best-article awards of the German History of Science Society (GWMT). In 2021–22, she held a Career Development Award, awarded to young scholars from any discipline by the Berlin University Alliance. She is a member of the German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Susanne's research has been supported by the Leopoldina, Max Weber Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Kurt Hahn Trust, and others. She is currently the recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant.

• History of the human scienes, esp. mind and behavioral sciences
• US and Caribbean history
• Gender and science
• Science in public/science communication
• Psychological humanities

• “Environment/Mother: Psychological Ecology, Gender, and Backlash, 1940–1990,” Isis 116 (2025), no. 2, 277–301.
• Midlife Crisis: Von den feministischen Ursprüngen eines Männer-Klischees, Munich: Goldmann (Penguin Random House) 2025.
• "Über die vergessenen Anfänge des Marshmallow-Tests" [The Forgotten Origins of the Marshmallow Test], Psychologische Rundschau 73 (2022) no. 3, 204–205.

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