Department News 2021-22

LSE ranked in the 2021 top five UK universities as ranked by the Guardian.

LSE climbed from nineteenth place in 2020 to fifth place in 2021.

You can view the 2021 Guardian league table: Best UK Universities 2021

Professor Jane Humphries has been invited by Newnham College to give a 150th Anniversary Lecture on Friday 22 October.

Professor Humphries will discuss today’s age of rising living costs and scrutiny of gender parity, the divisions of labour and the burden of caring and domestic work, much of it done by women without remuneration. She will explain how looking to the past can help us begin to calculate the value of unpaid labour and radically reinvigorate historical estimates of women’s contributions to economic growth and human wellbeing.  

Tickets for this in person event can be booked  here.

The latest LSE Researcher Q and A  features Dr Stefania Galli's research into the relationship between institutions and inequality in colonial and former colonial societies in Africa and the Americas from the 18th to the 20th century.

Dr Galli intends her work to shed light on the mechanisms behind inequality, and how institutions, and the tacit  values and beliefs behind them, can affect inequality levels and the opportunities available to different groups throughout their life.

You can read the full Q and A here: Exploring the relationship between institutions and inequality: a Q&A with Dr Stefania Galli

New faculty member, Dr Melanie Meng Xue, joins us this autumn as Assistant Professor. 

Dr Xue's research lies at the intersection of economic history and political economy, studying the rise of gender-equitable beliefs and the deterioration of social capital in the context of imperial China. By tracing the impact of historical events over time and in various institutional settings, her work isolates the role of values, beliefs, and norms in shaping economic and political disparities. Another strand of her research concerns decoding folklore and mythology as a new approach to understanding historical values. She has a forthcoming article on this in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. 

Career and Family: women's century-long journey toward equity
Online event, Thursday 25 November 2021 6:00pm to 7:30pm 
Hosted by the Department of Social Policy and the Department of Economic History

Claudia Goldin will talk about her new book Career and Family, tracing  how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. 

Full details of the event, including how to register are here: Claudia Goldin Book Event

Dr Anne Ruderman wins National Science Foundation (NSF) grant

Congratulations to Dr Ruderman for winning an NSF award for her project “Investing in Captivity: Financing the Transatlantic Slave Trade” (No. 2116150) joint with Marlous van Waijenburg (Harvard Business School).

Dr Neil Cummins will also be collaborating on a part of the project.

Spike Gibbs's research into the manor court system of the medieval and early modern period in England is  featured on LSE’s Research for the World blog.

Spike explains how his research into manor court records reveals a more nuanced relationship between lords and tenants in medieval England than has previously been understood.

The full blog article can be read here: Lords of the manor: feudal law and its impact on rural village life

Also featured is an animated case study drawn from Spike's research, which you can view here:

Crime and Punishment: Feudal law and its impact on rural village life | LSE Research

Spike's research will be published in a forthcoming article, co-authored with Jordan Claridge, in the  Journal of British Studies.

Felix Schaff's research into historical wealth inequality profiled on LSE Research 

Economic History PhD student Felix Schaff answers key questions on his research into historical wealth inequality in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution in a recent LSE research profile.

Felix  notes that research into pre-industrial inequality significantly changes how we think about causes of inequality in the long run. Rather than simply being the inevitable downside of economic growth, research into inequality in the very long run of history has shown that it develops independently, with political factors having much more of an influence than growth.

Read the full Q and A here: Felix Schaff: LSE Research Q and A 

Enrique Jorge-Sotelo awarded AEHE 2021 Earl J Hamilton Prize

Congratulations to PhD alum Dr Enrique Jorge-Sotelo, who was awarded the Asociación Española de Historia Económica (AEHA) the 2021 Earl J Hamilton Prize for his article “The limits to lender of last resort interventions in emerging economies: evidence from the Gold Standard and the Great Depression in Spain”, European Review of Economic History, 24 (1), pp. 98–133. 

The Earl J Hamilton prize is awarded to the best economic history article by an AEHE member published outside Spain.

The prize was awarded ex-aqueo with Mauricio Drelichman y David González Agudo 

Dr Anne Ruderman awarded The Council for European Studies’ (CES) First Article Prize

Congratulations to Dr Anne Ruderman whose article “Intra-European Trade in Atlantic Africa and the African Atlantic,” won the 2020 European Studies First Article Prize in the social sciences. The article was published in The William and Mary Quarterly 77, Issue 2 in 2020.