Susanne Schmidt is a historian of science and SNSF Professor in the Department of History at the University of Basel. Her book Midlife Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2020) provides the first historical study of the controversial concept of midlife crisis, which gained traction as a feminist idea in the United States in the 1970s before it was redefined by psychologists and psychiatrists. Susanne received her Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge in 2018. She was a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in Global History at the Freie University Berlin (2018–20) and in History of Science at the Humboldt University Berlin (2020–25), and has held fellowships at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Georgetown University and the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, and the Department of History at Stanford University.

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 Humboldt, Freie, and Technical Universities and Charité Berlin. She's 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 German National Academy of Sciences 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.

In Spring 2026, Susanne is on leave at the University of Oxford.

• 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, München: Goldmann 2025.
• "Über die vergessenen Anfänge des Marshmallow-Tests" [The Forgotten Origins of the Marshmallow Test], Psychologische Rundschau 73 (2022) no. 3, S. 204–205.

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