Professor Jane Humphries

Professor Jane Humphries is Centennial professor of Economic History at LSE and a Fellow of All Souls College. Her research interests focus on labour markets, industrialization and the links between the family and the economy. She has published extensively on gender, the family and the history of women's work, and is also interested in the causes and consequences of economic growth and structural change.

Her book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011) draws on numerous autobiographies by working men and uses innovative methodology to illuminate aspects of children's lives otherwise inaccessible on the basis of more conventional sources. The book received the Gyorgi Ranki Prize for an outstanding book in European Economic History by the Economic History Association in 2011 and formed the basis of a BBC4 documentary, The Children Who Built Victorian Britain, which Professor Humphries co-authored and presented.

Expertise

Economic history; growth and development; labour markets; child labour in the British industrial revolution; history of women’s work; relationship between the family and the economy; Gender and economics