Academic Staff available for graduate supervision

 

Dr Toke S Aidt
tsa23@econ.cam.ac.uk

Toke Aidt is Reader in Economics in the Faculty of Economics and fellow of Jesus College. His research areas include political economics, public choice, and economic history. He has a long-standing research interest in institutions and how they affect public finance outcomes, focusing on the 19th and early 20th century. He works on the origins of democratization with a focus on the threat of revolution as one of the driving factors. His work on the consequences of democratization focusses on Europe, Latin America and local government in England and Wales in the second half of the 19th century. His work on the Swing Riots is supported by the British Academy. His work has been published amongst others in Econometrica, the Economic Journal, Journal of Economic History, the Economic History Review, Cliometrica, and Journal of Politics.

 

Chris Briggs
cdb23@cam.ac.uk

Chris Briggs is Associate Professor in Medieval British Social and Economic History, and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He is a specialist in the rural history of England between c.1200 and c.1500, and works on topics such as peasant credit and debt, the land market, consumption and living standards, and the relationship between legal and economic change. His research is orientated towards making comparisons between medieval England and other geographical regions and historical periods. His publications include Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth Century England (2009). He is interested in supervising MPhil and PhD students working on topics in medieval economic and social history.

 

Professor David Chambers
adc53@cam.ac.uk

David Chambers Invesco Professor of Finance and Deputy Director of the Masters of Finance programme, Judge Business School. His research interests cover quantitative financial history, in particular, capital market development and the evolution of asset management. He has supervised MPhil students with an interest in financial history in the last two years.

 

Professor Amy Louise Erickson
ale25@cam.ac.uk

Amy EricksonProfessor of Feminist History, Fellow of Robinson College, and member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, working on the Occupational structure of Britain c.1379- 1911 project. Publications include Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993) and The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1500-1900 (2005), and other work on early modern economic and legal history, notably property transactions of inheritance and marriage. Current area of research is gendered concepts of work, women's occupations and occupational identity in the period 1600-1850, and the implications for the occupational structure of the English labour market.

 

Dr Bronwen Everill
bee21@cam.ac.uk

Amy EricksonDr Bronwen Everill is interested in economic life in urban West Africa and its connections to broader ideas of political economy and the emergence of imperial liberalism in the nineteenth century.  She is the author of Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (Harvard, 2020) and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Palgrave, 2013).

 

Dr Elizabeth Foyster
eaf21@cam.ac.uk

Elizabeth FoysterElizabeth Foyster is a Fellow and Lecturer at Clare College.  She has wide interests in British social history c.1600-1850, and in particular the history of family relationships in this period.  Her most recent book is The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England (2016), which explores the impact of learning disability and mental illness on family life.  This research has led to a study of speech impediments in eighteenth-century society; a study of the sexual vulnerability of people with learning disabilities in nineteenth-century Scotland (with Chris Holligan: UWS); and an investigation of the experiences of parents who had children with learning disabilities in early modern England.  She is also engaged in a joint research project with Professor Samantha Williams (Cambridge), which seeks to understand causes of mortality in early nineteenth-century England, through an analysis of data from the Equitable Life Assurance Society archive.

 

Professor Tim Harper
tnh1000@cam.ac.uk

Professor of the History of Southeast Asia, Fellow of Magdalene College and Director of the Centre for History and Economics, where he co-convenes, with Sunil Amrith, research projects on 'Sites of Asian Interactions: Networks, Ideas, Archives' and 'The Transnational History of Health in Southeast Asia, 1914-2014'.

 

Professor Mary Laven
mrl25@cam.ac.uk

Mary LavenProfessor of Early Modern History. Her research has focused on the social history of Italy with particular interests in gender, ethnic diversity, material culture and religion. She has supervised graduate students working on Venice, Genoa and southern Italy, as well as on Malta and the history of global Catholicism.

 

Dr Rachel Leow
rl341@cam.ac.uk

Associate Professor in East Asian History and fellow of Murray Edwards College and the Centre for History and Economics. At the Centre, she participates in the Transnational History of Health in Southeast Asia project and will take a leading role in a new Digital Humanities project at the Joint Centre.

 

Dr Natalia Mora-Sitja
nm371@cam.ac.uk

Associate Professor in Modern European Economic History. Her research has mainly focused on Spanish industrialisation since the eighteenth century, and more recently on gender and growth in historical perspective. Areas of research supervision may include Spanish economic and social history; European industrialisation; and topics on labour markets, inequality, migrations, or gender.

 

Professor Renaud Morieux
rm656@cam.ac.uk

Professor of British and European History and a Fellow of Jesus College and the Centre for History and Economics. Renaud's research interests centre on the history of Anglo-French relations in the long eighteenth century. At the Centre, Renaud coordinates, with Emma Rothschild, Pierre Singaravélou and David Todd, the research project Cordial Exchanges: Britain and France in the World since 1700. He co-convenes the Eighteenth Century Seminar and the Modern British History Seminar at the Faculty of History.

 

Professor Craig Muldrew
jcm11@cam.ac.uk

Craig MuldrewCraig Muldrew is Professor of Early Modern Economic and Social History in the Faculty of History and a fellow of Queens' College. His area of specialisation is the social and economic history of Early modern England. He has worked on the role of trust and credit in the development of the early modern economy, focusing on how markets affected social relations. He has also written on the social role of cash in the economy, wage payments, wealth and social identity, the importance of spinning in the early modern English economy, and labourers’ standards of living.  His publications include: The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England.  (Macmillan, 1998), and Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material  Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780, (Cambridge University Press, 2011).  He is about to publish a book on capital formation and society in early eighteenth century Britain.

 

Dr Duncan Needham
djn33@cam.ac.uk

Duncan NeedhamDuncan Needham is Senior Tutor of Darwin College, and Director of the Centre for Financial History. He is author of UK monetary policy from devaluation to Thatcher, 1967-82 and editor (with Anthony Hotson) of Expansionary Fiscal Contraction: the Thatcher government's 1981 Budget in perspective. He teaches postgraduate courses in international political economy. Before returning to academia, Duncan was a credit trader at JP Morgan and then a fund manager at Cairn Capital.  

 

Dr William O'Reilly
wto21@cam.ac.uk

Associate Professor in Early Modern History and Fellow and Tutor, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is currently Director of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of History (2011-13). Dr. O'Reilly is also a Senior Research Associate of the Centre for Financial History, Cambridge, and a Research Partner of the Asia and Europe in a Global Context project at the University of Heidelberg.

 

Dr Pedro Ramos Pinto
pr211@cam.ac.uk

Associate Professor in International Economic History and Fellow of Trinity Hall. His current research focus is on histories of inequality and of welfare systems, with a particular focus on Southern Europe as well as international perspectives. He convenes a network concerned with inequality in historical perspective. His recent work has focused on the history of the measurement of inequality, and on historical debates around forms of Universal Basic Income. His previous work has explored the emergence of social movements of the urban poor during the Portuguese Carnation Revolution (1974-1976): Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974-1975 (2013).

 

Dr Charles Read
cpr34@cam.ac.uk

Charles Read lectures, examines and supervises for the Faculty of History, where he is a postdoctoral fellow, and the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge, where he is an affiliated lecturer. His research and teaching interests focus on the business, economic and political history of Britain, Ireland and their empire over the past two centuries. His current research examines the economic causes and consequences of famines, financial crises and pandemics in the United Kingdom over that period. He is a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, where he is also the founding Director of the Bridging Course, the University’s first full-length scheme of its type designed to significantly increase the share of student body from under-represented backgrounds, which includes a residential summer school at the College each summer.

 

Dr Alice Reid
amr1001@cam.ac.uk

Alice Reid is Professor of Demography in the Department of Geography, and Co-Director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. She is also a fellow of Churchill College where she is Director of Studies in Geography. She is a historical demographer, working on the spatial and social influences on health, mortality and fertility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her recent projects investigate demographic and socio-economic differentials across England, Wales and Scotland using late nineteenth and early twentieth century census data, which can be explored on the interactive website www.PopulationsPast.org.

 

Dr Cristiano A. Ristuccia
car37@cam.ac.uk

Cristiano A. RistucciaCristiano A. Ristuccia is Director of Studies in Economics at Trinity Hall. He works on production technology and economic growth during the 20th century with particular reference to the inter-war period and the Second World War. His focus is comparative and covers industrial development in the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France and Italy. He collaborates with Adam Tooze (Yale) on a research project intended to quantify the global diffusion of key production technologies, and with Solomos Solomou (Economics) on the long-term macroeconomic effects of electricity diffusion. He is writing a book on the economic and industrial policies of Italian fascism which centres on the interrelation between ideology and economic policy-making. He is also interested in the issue of the financial credibility of dictatorships in the era of mass-politics. His teaching focuses on Germany and on international financial instability in the interwar period, and on the economics of dictatorships. He convenes with Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Richard Smith the Seminar in Quantitative History.

 

Professor Emma Rothschild
amp32@cam.ac.uk

Emma Rothschild Emma Rothschild is Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University. She is Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and professeur invitée at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. She is involved in collaborative research projects, at the University of Cambridge and at Harvard, on Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas and on Visualizing Historical Networks. She is also an Affiliated Faculty member at Harvard Law School. Publications include “Economic History and Nationalism” (Capitalism, Winter 2021), “A (New) Economic History of the American Revolution?” (New England Quarterly, March 2018), "Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France" (American Historical Review, October 2014), Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011), and An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2021).

 

Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor
lmws2@cam.ac.uk

Professor of economic history and co-director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. His research interests are in long-run social and economic developments in England and Wales between the late middle ages and First World War with a particular focus on the development of agrarian capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the role of transport improvements in economic development. He is director, with Amy Erickson of an ongoing program of research: The occupational structure of Britain c.1379-1911. With Gareth Austin, Marc Badia Miró, Alexis Litvine, Osamu Saito and Emiliano Travieso he co-ordinates a number of international networks focussed on the comparative history of occupational structure. With Dan Bogart at the University of California at Irvine he runs a project on transport, urbanization and economic development 1680-1911.

 

Professor Peter Sloman
pjs93@cam.ac.uk
Peter Sloman is Professor of British Politics in the Department of POLIS and a Fellow of Churchill College. His research focusses on political ideas, public policy, and electoral politics in modern Britain, and his publications include The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964 (2015), Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain (2019), and an edited collection on Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective (2021), co-edited with Daniel Zamora Vargas and Pedro Ramos Pinto.

 

Dr Solomos Solomou
Solomos.Solomou@econ.cam.ac.uk

Solomos SolomouReader in Economics and Economic History, Faculty of Economics. My research interests are in the following areas: Start-Stop Economic Growth in the 19th and 20th Centuries; long economic cycles; business cycles; the impact of trade policy during 1870-1914; interwar trade policy; exchange rate regimes and economic performance; weather and sectoral economic fluctuations; global weather shocks and economic effects.

 

Professor Simon Szreter
srss@cam.ac.uk

Simon Szreter

Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, Fellow of St John's College, an honorary associate of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and was a co-PI of the Wellcome-funded Generation to Reproduction Strategic Award to the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. He is co-founder of History&Policy and is the Editorial Director of its website, www.historyandpolicy.org. He researches and supervises aspects of economic, social, demographic and public policy history and has published many books, including Fertility, Class and GenderHealth and WealthRegistration and Recognition and Sex before the Sexual Revolution.

Two books in last 5 years are: Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter, After the Virus. Lessons from the Past for A Better Future (C.U.P. Sept 2021);

Simon Szreter, editor, The Hidden Affliction. Sexually transmitted infections and infertility in history (University of Rochester Press 2019).

 

Professor Paul Warde           
psw1000@cam.ac.uk

Paul Warde is Professor of Environmental History in the Faculty of History. He works on the environmental, economic and social history of early modern and modern Europe, with interests lying in particular in the history of energy use and its relationship with social, economic and political development, and environmental change. He has worked extensively on peasant societies in early modern Europe, and their use and exchange of commodities, especially wood, and the effects on management of the land and forests; on the Industrial Revolution and the scale and consequences of shifts from 'traditional' energy carriers to fossil fuels and new renewable forms of energy supply; and on the history of environmental and economic thought, especially key concepts like 'sustainability' and 'environment'.

 

Professor Samantha Williams           
skw30@cam.ac.uk

Samantha WilliamsSamantha Williams is Professor of Social History at the Institute of Continuing Education and Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Girton College. She is Course Director of the MSt in History. Her research interests encompass the history of poverty in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and welfare provision for unmarried mothers in London. She is also engaged in a joint research project with Dr Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge), which seeks to understand causes of mortality in early nineteenth-century England, through an analysis of data from the Equitable Life Assurance Society archive.