Jane Humphries

Jane Humphries received her first-class economics degree from Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1970. She went on to Cornell University in New York State to earn both her masters and her doctoral degrees, completed in 1973. Her main research interests have been labor markets, industrialization, and the links between the family and the economy. She has published extensively on wages, the family, the standard of living and the history of women's work. She began her academic career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an assistant professor in 1973–1979, then as an associate professor. She was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and later a fellow of Newnham College. In 1993, Prof. Humphries was a visiting fellow at the Center for Population and Development at Harvard University's School of Public Health.
In 1995, she returned to Newnham College as reader in economics and economic history, then became a reader in economic history and fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. In 2004, she was named Professor of Economic History at All Souls. In 2012, Humphries was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. After retiring from Oxford as Emeritus Professor, she became Centennial Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in 2018. She has served on the editorial boards of numerous peer-reviewed journals. Her own 2019 article, "Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260-1850," co-authored with Jacob Weisdorf, was awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize. Her books include Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010), which used an innovative quantitative and qualitative methodology to illuminate aspects of children's lives that are inaccessible on the basis of more conventional sources and was awarded the Gyorgi Ranki Prize for an outstanding book in European Economic History by the Economic History Association in 2011. The book was the basis for a BBC4 documentary, The Children Who Built Victorian Britain, which Prof. Humphries co-wrote and presented, and which won an International History Makers award for the Best History Program in 2012. In 2018, she was named a CBE for services to Social Science and Economic History.