Olivia Robinson

Olivia Robinson

Guest researcher, Guest Researcher

I am a British historian working at the intersection of migration, social, economic and demographic history and historical geography.

My research to date has focused on 'history from below', tracing the lives and experiences of women migrants and working-class people. My PhD from Oxford University traced the employment and migration experiences of foreign, female domestic servants in 19th and early 20th century London. It combined big-data quantitative analysis, based on over 22,000 individual census entries, with fine-grained life course analysis of several hundred individual women whose experiences can be traced through government and institutional records. It advanced an analytical approach based in historical geography in considering the extent of women’s scope for agency, placing them at the centre of the narrative as agents of mobility. It tracked key changes in immigration legislation, used space as a theme, and complicated traditional economic narratives of male-dominated international migration.

I am currently working with Link-Lives, an academic project to link historical sources across time and space, generating life-courses for millions of Danish individuals in the period 1787-1968.

ID: 245405178