Abstract

Date: Monday, 27 November 2023 Time: 18:00 -19:30 Speaker: Professor Jane Humphries Talk Title: ‘Careworn: Towards an economic history of caring work’ Location:  Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar will be held on Monday,27 November 2023. Professor Jane Humphries will give a talk on “Careworn: Towards an economic history of caring work”. The seminar will beheld in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School. Speaker Biog: Jane Humphries is Emeritus Professor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford, and a Centennial Chair in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics. Her interests include labour markets, industrialisation 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 2010book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution drew on a large number of autobiographies by working men and used an innovative quantitative and qualitative methodology to illuminate aspects of children’s lives which are inaccessible on the basis of more conventional sources. The sources were also used to quantify the formation of human capital and children’s economic contributions during industrial transformation using a model of a labour market with child labour. The monograph was awarded the Gyorgi Ranki Prize for an outstanding book in European Economic History by the Economic History Association in 2011 and provided the basis for a successful BBC4 documentary, The Children Who Built Victorian Britain, which she co-wrote and presented. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people/jane-humphries/