About me
Hi! I’m a PhD student at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow (Forsker III) at Oslo Metropolitan University’s Centre for Research on Pandemics & Society (PANSOC).
Most of my work focuses on the societal impacts of social and demographic crises. I have a particular focus on better understanding the 1918 influenza pandemic, but I have also worked on the trends in high-income national fertility after the 2009 global financial crisis and on the geography of mental health around the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. One of my bigger collaborative projects uses census microdata data from 1880s through the 2010s to test how polygyny affects marriage markets and might impact social conflict.
My PhD thesis focuses on re-estimating the death toll of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States, using new methods and data.
At LSE, I am based in the Department of Economic History, but I am involved in the community of demographers spread across the university and beyond. I co-organise LSE’s cross-department Demography Seminar Series, and further afield, I am on the Board of the Association of Young Historical Demographers and the EU-funded GREATLEAP project.
Before landing at LSE, I completed a MPhil in Demography at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. During my MPhil, I was affiliated with Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Department of Sociology. Before that, I completed a BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford, an interdisciplinary programme of biology and social science.
Current projects
If you want to read what I am working on at the moment, here are a few of my current preprints!
- “Can we estimate crisis death tolls by subtracting population estimates? A critical review and appraisal” (with Maria Gargiulo), doi:10.31235/osf.io/nrpb3
- “Highly polygynous societies do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market” (with Laura Fortunato and Rebecca Sear), doi:10.31235/osf.io/wtymg
- “The missing Pacific influenza epidemics, 1918–21” (with Svenn-Erik Mamelund and Michael G. Baker), doi:10.31235/osf.io/4mb5a
- “We are our memory: Quantifying the demographic imprints of the past”, doi:10.31235/osf.io/6r5b8