Charlotte Leubuscher (born 24 July 1888 in Jena; died 2 June 1961 in London) was a German-British social scientist and economist.[1]
Born as the daughter of the Privy Medical Councillor Georg Leubuscher, she attended the Gymnasium Bernhardinum in Meiningen, where she was the first girl ever to graduate from high school. She then studied economics, history, philosophy and law in Cambridge, Giessen, Munich and Berlin. In the summer of 1912 Leubuscher spent 12 weeks in England studying industrial relations in the railway industry in collaboration with Lujo Brentano and this became the basis for her 1913 Berlin doctorate under Heinrich Herkner.
Leubuscher spent the war years working as a statistician and returned to the University of Berlin in 1919, where she habilitated with the thesis "Socialism and Socialization in England".[2] Her habilitation was the third by a woman and the first outside the natural sciences there. In 1923 she received a lectureship in foreign social policy, especially of England and Russia, at the University of Göttingen. Leubuscher returned to Britain several times for research study.[1] In 1924 she moved to the University of Berlin, where she was appointed associate professor in 1929.
Leubuscher was half-Jewish and in 1933 her teaching license was revoked by the Nazi government. She emigrated to England and taught at various universities, including Cambridge, Manchester and the London School of Economics. From 1933 to 1936 Leubuscher received research scholarships from Girton College, Cambridge.[1] Leubuscher began to focus om colonial economics and was one of the first economists to focus on development economics. Her archive is located in the Staatsarchiv Meiningen.
Charlotte Leubuscher died in 1961 at the age of almost 73 years in London. She was buried in the Cemetery II of the Jerusalem and New Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where her grandfather Rudolf Leubuscher (1821–1861) had also found his final resting place a century earlier. Both graves have been preserved.[3]