Portrait of Aurélien Goutsmedt

Aurélien Goutsmedt

Historian of economics & political economist

Biography

I am Assistant Professor at ICHEC Brussels Management School and Lecturer at UCLouvain.

I am a historian of economics and a political economist. My research deals with the history of macroeconomics, economic expertise and economic policies since the 1970s, with a focus on central banks — notably the Bank of England and the European Central Bank — and on how inflation has been understood and fought. I also develop quantitative tools for the history of economics, and social sciences more generally: R packages on bibliometric networks and text analysis, as well as open databases.

From 2021 to 2026, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE) of UCLouvain, first as an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral fellow, studying the scientific, organisational and political issues raised by macroeconomic forecasting at the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the Bank of England (project). Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the History of Political Economy of Duke University (2018–2019) and at the CIRST (UQAM, 2020–2021). I hold a PhD in economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2017), on macroeconomists and the 1970s stagflation.

I have been involved in several collective projects: “Excavating the Academia/Policy Pipeline” on economic research at the Bank of England (UK ESRC, Rebuilding Macroeconomics); “Mapping Macroeconomics” with Alexandre Truc (History of Economics Society New Initiatives Fund). I am currently developing a project on how narratives shape anti-inflation policies in Europe.

I teach economic history, European economics and EU institutions at ICHEC Brussels Management School and international political economy at UCLouvain.

I am managing editor of OEconomia (in charge of book reviews). I sit on the board of the Association belge francophone de science politique (ABSP), where I used to coordinate the political economy working group and organise the 2027 congress. I was an elected board member of the Charles Gide Association (2020–2026) and am active in the REHPERE network.

Interests

  • History of economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Political economy
  • Economic expertise & central banks
  • Stagflation & oil shocks
  • R-stats
  • Bibliometrics
  • Natural language processing & LLMs

Education

Positions, grants, talks and academic activities are detailed in my CV.