About

Clara E. Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the Founding President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation.
Learn more @ freefreeforum.org, where she hosts the weekly FREE podcast.

Clara was previously associate professor at The New School for Social Research Economics Department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.  Her research contributes to the analysis and history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. 

Her first book, Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, November 2022), has been translated into over a dozen languages. It was named one of the Financial Times’ Ten Best Economics Books of 2022 and was awarded the 2023 Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, as well as the 2026 Hans Matthöfer Prize in Germany. The book investigates the origins of austerity in the aftermath of the First World War, uncovering its logic as a tool of reaction deployed against alternatives to capitalism.

Clara recently published her trade book Escape from Capitalism (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, and Simon & Schuster, January 2026), which will soon be translated into multiple languages, including French, German, and Italian. 

She is currently working on a book project which critically reassesses the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-1975) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. 

Her writings have appeared, among other venues, in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano, the Italian national newspaper to which she regularly contributes.