Appointment: Matías Dewey

Prof. Matías Dewey completed his Licenciatura in Sociology at the University of Salvador, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and then worked for another two years as a researcher at Del Salvador University, Argentina. He moved to Germany for his doctorate at the University of Rostock, where he received his doctorate in political science in 2008. With a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he worked as a researcher at the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies and started as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne in 2011. In 2020, he habilitated in Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. In 2020 he took up a position at the University of St.Gallen and since 2023, has held the vacant Chair of Latin American Studies (following the retirement of Prof. Yvette Sánchez).

Matias Dewey is currently President of the Swiss Society of Americanists, member of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS) and Director of the Centro Latinoamericano-Suizo (CLS-HSG).

His research

Matias Dewey's research focuses on informal and illegal economies from the perspective of economic and political sociology. In the area of illegal markets, he has conducted extensive field research on the market for stolen cars and car parts, the market for counterfeit products, the trade in illicit drugs and the phenomenon of child sexual abuse. Together with Jens Beckert, he has published the book The Architecture of Illegal Markets. Toward an Economic Sociology of Illegality in the Economy (Oxford University Press) and is currently co-editor with Annette Hübschle of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Illegal Markets. In the field of the informal economy, Matias Dewey has researched and published extensively on the informal garment market in Argentina and Brazil. In 2020 he published Making It at Any Cost: Aspirations and Politics in a Counterfeit Clothing Marketplace (University of Texas Press) and forthcoming Low-Cost Fashion: The Political Economy of Garment Production and Distribution in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, with André Vereta Nahoum) and the edited volume The Other Garment Industry: Politics, marketplaces and the informal production of fashion in Latin America (University College London). Together with Prof. Roy Gava (SEPS-HSG) and Prof. Mariana Valente (ILE-HSG), he developed a project on digital intermediaries (platforms and means of payment) in illegal markets in Latin America, which was funded by the GFF program of the University of St.Gallen. Matias Dewey is also part of the SNSF project “Marketplaces”, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Patrik Aspers.