Professor Simon Szreter

Simon Szreter is Professor in History and Public Policy in the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. He teaches modern British Economic and Social history since 1700 and World Population, Development and Environment since 1750. His main fields of research are demographic, public health, economic and social history, the history of empirical social science and methods for registering and measuring populations, and the relationship between history and contemporary public policy issues.

Registration and recognition - Simon Szreter

His principal publications are: Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940 (Cambridge 1996); Changing Family Size in England and Wales 1891-1911:  Place, Class and Demography (co-authored, Cambridge 2001), Categories and contexts. Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography (co-edited, Oxford 2004); Health and Wealth: Studies in History and Policy (Rochester University Press 2005); Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (Cambridge 2010 co-authored with Kate Fisher); History, Historians and Development Policy. A Necessary Dialogue. Edited by C.A. Bayly, V.Rao, S.Szreter and M. Woolcock (Manchester University Press 2011); The Big Society Debate. A New Agenda for Social Welfare?, co-edited with Armine Ishkanian (Edward Elgar 2012); and Registration and Recognition. Documenting the Person in World History, co-edited with Keith Breckenridge; Foreword by C.A. Bayly. Proceedings of the British Academy 182 (Oxford University Press 2012).

Since 2013 he has published a series of pioneering articles on STIs in history, culminating in an edited collection, The Hidden Affliction Affliction. Sexually-transmitted infections and infertility in history (Rochester University Press 2019).

The Hidden Affliction - Simon Szreter

He has also authored numerous articles in historical journals and edited special issues of Social History of Medicine and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.  He has published on policy issues in World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Population and Development Review, International Journal of Epidemiology, America Journal of Public Health and The Lancet.

He was co-founder of History&Policy in 2002 and continues to  be its managing editor, with over 200 Policy Papers now published on www.historyandpolicy.org.

Simon Szreter was awarded the Arthur Viseltear Prize in 2009 by the American Public Health Association in recognition of his distinguished body of scholarship in the history of public health.

In 2019 he was lead author with Hilary Cooper and Ben Szreter of a winning submission for the inaugural IPPR Economics Prize with an entry, titled ‘Incentivising an Ethical Economics’.