skip to primary navigation skip to content

Department of Geography

 

Romola Davenport BA, BA, MSc PhD

Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure

Historical demographer and historical geographer interested in mortality, urbanisation and migration, particularly the long-run epidemiological consequences of urbanisation and rural-urban migration.

Biography

Career

  • 2011- : Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
  • 2010-2011: Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Wellcome Generation to Reproduction project)
  • 2008-2010: Visiting Research Fellow, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure
  • 2007-08: Departmental Lecturer in Demography, Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford
  • 2006-2007: Research Fellow, Oxford Institute of Ageing
  • 2001-2006: Senior Research Fellow, Newnham College Cambridge
  • 2000-2005: Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow
  • 1998-2001: Junior Research Fellow, Newnham College Cambridge

Qualifications

  • M.Sc. (Demography) London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
  • Ph.D. (Botany) University of Cambridge
  • B.A. (Hons. Botany) University of Adelaide
  • B.A. (History) University of New South Wales

Research

My early research as a plant physiologist was motivated by a concern with population growth and food security. However the slowing of global population growth rates and a dawning awareness of the complexity of population-resource interactions led me to retrain as a demographer, a career that combined more effectively my interests in history and geography as well as biology.

The main focus of my research is the ‘Mortality Revolution’ that has led over the last three centuries to a rise in global life expectancy from around 30 years to over 70 years today. This revolution began in north-west European societies in the eighteenth century and was associated particularly with a dramatic fall in death rates in urban populations. This improvement in urban death rates was a crucial pre-requisite for the urbanisation and industrialisation that ensued and that has now become a global phenomenon. Despite the disamenities of urban slums today average life expectancies are generally higher in urban than in rural populations, a dramatic reversal of historical norms. The causes of these enormous improvements remain poorly understood. My research seeks to improve the empirical basis for the study of historical mortality transitions, and to investigate these transitions using spatial and disease-specific approaches. The research programme has four main themes (see ‘Research projects’ at right):

  • Investigation of the roles of urban centres as drivers of epidemiological change in north-western Europe, and the epidemiological consequences of rural-urban migration patterns 1600-1945
  • Elucidation of trends in mortality in ‘new’ industrial and manufacturing cities during the Industrial Revolution
  • Investigation of the contribution of public health measures especially at the local level to the prevention of infectious diseases
  • Identification of the timing and causes of the emergence of differences in mortality by social status

Publications

[Publications will load automatically from the University’s publications database…]