Few events have attracted so much attention before being relegated to academic neglect like the 1980s debt crisis. For almost a decade, a considerable number of developing countries underwent serious macroeconomic shocks and profound social dislocations. These phenomena attracted the interest of a wide range of scholars from the field of economics, political science and sociology who published a substantial number of books and articles on the multi-faceted crises. As capital returned to the region in the early 1990s and neo-liberalism seemed victorious on the global scene, the crisis appeared to gradually disappear from the academic debate. Notably, historians only seem to appear on the sidelines of the academic debate until the Great Recession of the late 2000s. The contribution will follow the academic debate on the 1982 debt crisis from multiple disciplines to understand where, how and why the crisis gradually disappeared from the academic scene after the Brady Plan of 1989 before making its reappearance following the Great Recession, the European debt crisis and the Covid pandemic.