Ambassadors are the vital link between the executive board and the community. Ambassadors should represent a certain geographical area and try to represent and convey the wishes and ideas of the young historical demographers in their area in their advice to the executive board. Ambassadors can also organize and lead working groups with other people which focus on a certain research area or other relevant issues that should be addressed within our community. Below you can find the ambassadors for several geographic areas:

Africa: Chanda Chiseni (Lund University)
Chanda Michael Chiseni completed his Master’s degree in Economics at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. For his master’s dissertation, he looked at the “Spatial Distribution of White Living Standards in South Africa during the mineral Revolution”. This year, he has joined the department of Economic History at Lund University as a PhD candidate. He is currently work on a project that is looking at the current population developments in Africa from a historic perspective.

Asia: Hao Dong (Peking University)
Hao DONG (董 浩) is an Assistant Professor and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He is also a Peking University Boya Young Fellow, and a Non-resident Scholar at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University. Before joining Peking University, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China and Postdoctoral Affiliate at the Office of Population Research (OPR) and Department of Sociology, Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. (2017) and M.Phil. (2012) in Social Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and B.L. (2010) in Sociology from Zhejiang University. His research broadly concerns Social Demography (especially, Family, Kinship, Migration and Health), Social Stratification and Mobility, Multi-Generational and Life Course Studies, and Comparative Historical Demography. He is interested in understanding how social and family context shapes demographic differentials and socioeconomic inequality from a comparative perspective, emphasizing not only geographical comparisons – within East Asia and between East and West, but also temporal comparisons – throughout the life course, across multiple generations, and between the past and present.

Eastern Europe: Oana Sorescu-Iudean (University of Regensburg/Babeș-Bolyai University)
Oana Sorescu-Iudean has been undertaking her PhD research at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, at the University of Regensburg, in a co-tutelle agreement with the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Since October 2015 she has been employed as a research assistant at the Centre for Population Studies at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, where she has worked extensively with the data contained in the Historical Population Database of Transylvania. Her research is located primarily in the sphere of social history, with a strong focus on inheritance in eighteenth-century urban contexts in Transylvania. She is moreover endeavoring to locate female agency in reproductive decisions in this geographical area. Her current research has led her to implement social network analysis in this milieu, as a result of a focus on intermediary occupational categories – such as priests and midwives – who ‘brokered’ between village and city, or various national-ethnical groups and the state configurations that succeeded themselves in this region.
She is also interested in supporting the establishment of a coherent body of young scholars trained in the newest methods and approaches in social history and historical demography. In this respect, she aims to help bridge the practical and theoretical knowledge gaps between Eastern and Western-European students in historical demography, and to raise awareness of and interest in the systemic differences implied by current or older theoretical demographic models.

Oceania: Isabelle Cherkesly (Monash University)
Isabelle is undertaking a PhD at Monash University (Clayton Campus) in Australia. Her research concentrates on female convict marriages in 19^th century Van Diemen’s Land. This research is being completed with the database collected by the Founders and Survivors project (FAS) and the Female Convicts Research Center (FCRC) in Tasmania. She has previously completed an MA in demography at Université de Montréal (SSHRC scholarship), during which she studied French Canadian marriage patterns in 19^th century Canada (1852-1921). This Master’s research was completed with the NAPP (North Atlantic Population Project), CCRI (Canadian Century Research Infrastructure) and CFP (Canadian Families Project) data, and with the help and resources of the Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique (PRDH). This previous research has awarded Isabelle with an expertise in using Canadian historical census.

Southern Europe: Gabriel Brea Martinez (Autonomous University Barcelona/Lund University). Gabriel Brea-Martínez acquired a PhD in History from the Auntonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), a Master in Population and Territorial Studies (UAB) and a Master in Demography (European Doctoral School of Demography – Max Planck Institute and University of La Sapienza-Rome). Presently he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economic History and at the Centre for Economic Demography of Lund University. Gabriel’s research within the Landskrona Population Study (PI Martin Dribe) at the Centre for Economic Demography of Lund University merges tools of family demography with the analysis of economic inequality and social stratification at the micro level. Therefore, its research aims at analysing how demographic behaviours affect long- and short-term socioeconomic inequality and social reproduction processes. Inequality mirrors how the resources and opportunities are distributed among individuals, thus implying the need for considering individuals as active agents in the generation of inequality as part of determined demographic and economic systems, which grants to each individual specific socioeconomic characteristics.

Western Europe: Yuliya Hilevych (University of Cambridge)
Yuliya Hilevych works on the study of reproduction, social relations, and public policy across time and space. She holds BA and MA degrees in Sociology from the University of Lviv, Ukraine, and a PhD in Sociology from Wageningen University (joint degree with Radboud University), the Netherlands. Previously she held researcher appointments at Radboud University and the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demography Institute (NIDI). At present she is a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Cambridge, and a guest researcher at the Radboud Group of Historical Demography and Family History, Radboud University.

Western Europe: Jeanne Cilliers (Lund University)
Jeanne Cilliers holds a PhD in economics from Stellenbosch University and is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economic History at Lund University. Her research interests are in the fields of economic and historical demography, with a focus on colonial Africa. Her expertise is in working with large historical demographic databases. This has most recently included the digitisation of the South African Genealogical Registers, which formed the basis of her doctoral dissertation: A Demographic History of Settler South Africa. She is currently working in the Cape of Good Hope Panel Project: Quantitative studies of long-term growth, inequality and labour coercion in a developing region. The goal of the project is to construct the first ever multi-generational individual-level panel data-set for a developing region (the Cape Colony c. 1665-1840).

North America (USA): Matt Nelson (University of Minnesota)         
Matt Nelson is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, University of Minnesota where he works on the IPUMS Historical Census Project producing complete count U.S. Census datasets from 1790 to 1940. He completed his Ph.D. (2018) in History with a focus on Population Studies from the University of Minnesota and his B.A. (2010) in History and Economics with Honors from the University of Minnesota, Morris. Broadly interested in historical demography and family history, his recent research focuses on measuring the effects of kin and social networks on demographic and economic outcomes, identifying enumerator bias in census data, and the history of the U.S. Census.

North America (Canada): Roxana Arana Ovalle (Université de Montréal)

Roxana is a PhD student in demography at the University of Montreal (UdeM) in Canada, she holds a master’s degree in science and a bachelor’s degree in statistics. Her work focuses on the analysis of the Mexican demographic transition, the change in family dynamics and the evolution of indigenous populations from the beginning of the 20th century to its current state. She is also interested in the operationalization of social phenomena such as human development, rurality, socioeconomic development, social inequity, education, violence, and gender equity. She is a teaching assistant in the Department of Demography at UdeM as well as a research assistant in the Research Program in Historical Demography group of the Canadian Population (PRHD). She is also a Senior Research in the Social Statistics group of the Statistics Department at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo in Mexico.

Vacancies please click here to see the function description and contact the president of the AYHD.

South America: Vacancy