Board

Board

To be able to strengthen the field of historical demography it is important that also junior staff has a platform to interact with each other. The Association for Young Historical Demographers has a daily executive board which is responsible for addressing important issues of, and questions from, junior staff in the field of historical demography. Below you can find the current executive board:

President: Louise Villefrance Isted Ludvigsen (University of Copenhagen)

Louise Ludvigsen is a historian who specializes in 19th and 20th-century medical history and historical demography. She gained an MA in History from the University of Copenhagen in 2018 and went on to work as an archivist at the Danish National Archives, administrating the Danish Demographic Database. In September 2020 Louise started a Ph.D. as part of the Link-Lives project at the Danish National Archives and the University of Copenhagen. Her project examines the Danish classification systems of causes of death from 1836-1941, and compares them with the “International Classification of Diseases” from 1893-2020, in order to develop methods for coding causes of death in life-course databases. Previous work has focused on the professionalization of apothecaries in Denmark and the emergence of Denmark’s first female doctors. Her main interests include social and medical history, historical demography (in particular morbidity and mortality), as well as the use of coding and classification systems in historical research. 

Vice President: Emma Diduch (University of Cambridge)

Emma Diduch holds a BA in History from the College of William & Mary and a MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford. In 2021-2, she was an adjunct lecturer for Social Science Statistics at Mary Baldwin University. In 2022 she started a PhD at Cambridge focusing on the role of women’s labour force participation and textile employment in the fertility transition using a linked dataset of censuses, civil registration records, and factory archival sources from Derbyshire, England, 1881-1911.

Secretary: Mathias Mølbak Ingholt (Roskilde University)

Mathias Mølbak Ingholt holds a masters in History and is pursuing a PhD in historical epidemiology at Roskilde University. In his PhD project titled ‘The epidemiology and medical history of malaria in nineteenth-century Denmark’, Mathias studies the geography of malaria and the factors associated with its disappearance, and links this with the changing meaning of the intermittent fever diagnosis. Mathias has been a visiting scholar at both Lund University (Department of Economic History) and at University of Cambridge (Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure). His academic interests include historical demography, agricultural history and medical history.

PR-Officer (website): Mads Perner (University of Copenhagen)

Mads L. Perner is a social and economic historian and a PhD fellow at the Danish National Archives and the University of Copenhagen, where he is affiliated with the Link-Lives project. His project examines gender-specific, socio-economic and intergenerational inequalities in child mortality in 19th century Denmark. Previous work has focused on the history of cholera in Denmark, residential segregation in 19th century cities, as well as the demographic consequences of war in the 17th century. His main research interests include historical demography, methods of record linkage, as well as the use of spatial and quantitative methods in historical research.

PR-Officer (social media): Joris Kok (Leiden University)

Joris Kok studied Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Economic History at Lund University, Sweden, specialising in women’s historical labour force participation. He is currently employed as a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social History and the Institute for History, Leiden University. In his PhD project, Joris examines the social mobility and integration of Jews, particularly Jewish diamond workers, in Amsterdam between 1850 and 1940. In this work, special attention is given to marital networks and residential choice. He is also involved in the project ‘Female Empowerment and Economic Growth: The Case of Sweden, 1749-2016’ together with researchers at the Centre for Economic Demography in Lund, which looks into the long-term relationship between gender equality, economic growth, and demographic indicators.


Previous board members:

  • Elisabeth Mjaaland, Vice President (2022-2023)
  • Tim Riswick, President (2016-2022)
  • Evelien Walhout, Secretary (2018-2022)
  • Michal Raftakis, PR-Officer Website (2018-2022)
  • Sarah Rafferty, PR-Officer Social Media (2019-2022)
  • Ryohei Mogi, Vice-President (2019-2021)
  • Jeanne Cilliers, PR-Officer Newsletter (2016-2020)
  • Stephanie Thiehoff-Klages, PR-Officer Social Media (2016-2018)
  • Benjamin Matuzak, Vice-President (2016-2018)
  • Edward Morgan, PR-Officer Website (2016-2018)
  • Christa Matthys, Secretary (2016-2018)