Research Focus

• history of development
• global history
• international organizations
• decolonization
• humanitarianism
• peacekeeping
• North South conflict
• structural adjustment
• neoliberalism

Profile
I am an Associate Professor in Development Studies and responsible for the history section of the study program. I currently serve as Vice-Department Head. I joined the faculty in 2020, after teaching at the University of Bern and at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, I held fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence and at Yale University. I completed my Ph.D. in history at New York University in 2016.

My monograph "Building States" (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/building-states/9780231200257/) on how United Nations personnel tried to manage and influence decolonization was published in 2022. That same year, I edited a special issue on the global history of international organizations and decolonization (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022822000043). More recently, I co-edited a volume on the paradoxical history of multilateral cooperation during the Cold War (https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350423985).
I have also written about postcolonial careering in international development (https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2018.0012), UN assistance with mass layoffs in the Iranian oil industry (10.1080/0023656x.2019.1537019) and the strange triumph of state sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000316).
Most recently, I contributed to a discussion on histories of the UN (https://www.shafr.org/assets/docs/Passport/passport-09-2025.pdf).

I am the principal investigator of the FWF-funded project "North/South - A Conflict that Did not Exist?" (https://ie.univie.ac.at/en/research/projects/northsouth-a-conflict-that-did-not-exist/) (11/2025- 09/2026) and of the ERC Starting Grant project "A Global Consensus? The Contested History of Structural Adjustment in the Age of Shock - SHOCKAGE"(https://www.univie.ac.at/forschung/strategische-schwerpunkte/detail/muschik-eva-maria) (02/2026 - 01/2031). I also serve as co-principal investigator/doctoral supervisor in the FWF-funded project "The Dynamics of Change and the Logics of Transformation: State, Society, and Economy at Critical Junctures” (https://ie.univie.ac.at/forschung/drittmittelprojekte/fwf-docfunds-doctoral-program/) (09/2024 - 08/2028).

You can find information on courses that I taught at the University of Vienna here.
https://ufind.univie.ac.at/en/person.html?id=109287

For my publications, CV, and graduate thesis supervision, please see documents below.

For (more or less up to date) further information, please see my u:cris profile (https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/persons/eva-maria-muschik/).