Professor K Schurer

Professor Schürer is an Honorary Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus. He came to Leicester in 2010 as Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Enterprise). Prior to this he was Director of the UK Data Archive and previously worked at the internationally-renowned Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (University of Cambridge) and taught in the Department of History University of Essex where he was also Research Director and Director of the Centre for Local and Regional History. He currently is working again at the History of Population Group at the University of Cambridge He is an elected Fellow of the Academy for the Social Sciences and has previously served as the UK representative on the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure working group in Social Science and Humanities; President of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives; President of the International Association for History and Computing; as a member of the British Library’s Advisory Council the Research Libraries Network Advisory Committee and several other the national and international committees.

My main research interests focus around historical demography and the history of the family. With this area I specialise on household and family structures in the past migration regional and local identity and community history. Currently I am working on an ESRC-funded research project based at Cambridge entitled ""Britain’s first demographic transition: an integrated geography"" which looks at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century fertility and mortality transitions at a local level across Britain. This project uses the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) resource -- a vast database of 180 million census records for the period 1851 to 1911which I created during 2009-2013 supported with funding from the ESRC. I also previously worked on the identification of Richard III following the famous discovery of his remains in a car park in Leicester. I worked with geneticist Prof Turi King to identify and verify present day living relatives of the king who could be used to match DNA for identification purposes. Following on from this work I still continue to work on the Plantagenets and their DNA. 

K. Schurer, 'Foreword' to P. Laslett, The World we have Lost (Routledge Classics Edition, 2021). 

Jaadla, H., Reid, A., Garrett, E., Schurer, K. and Day, J., ‘Revisiting the fertility transition in England and Wales: The role of social class and migration, Demography (2020).

Reid, A., Jaadla, H., Garrett, E. and Schurer, K., Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes, Population Studies, 74:2 (2020), 197-218

K. Schurer and J. Day, The changing importance of London, 1851-1911: migration flows and the development of the north-south divide, Social History, 44 (3), (2019), 26-56.

K. Schurer, E. Garrett, H. Jaadla and A. Reid, Household and family structure in England and Wales, 1851-1911: continuities and change, Continuity & Change, 33 (3) (2018), 365-411..

K. Schurer, T. Penkova and Y. Shi, Standardising and coding birthplace strings and occupational titles in the British censuses of 1851 to 1911, Historical Methods, 48(4) (2015), 195-213. 

K. Schurer and T. Penkova, Creating a typology of parishes in England and Wales: mining 1881 census data, Historical Life Course Studies, 2 (2015), 38-57. 

K. Schurer and E. Higgs, Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM); 1851-1911 [computer file], Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], April 2014. SN: 7481.

E. Garrett, A. Reid, K. Schurer and S. Szreter Changing family size in England and Wales: class, place and demography, 1891-1911, (Cambridge 2001). 

K. Schurer, Leaving home in England and Wales 1850-1920, in F. van Poppel, M. Oris and J. Lee, (eds.), The road to independence. Leaving home in Eastern and Western societies, 16th-20th centuries, (Bern-Bruxelles 2003), 33-84.

K. Schurer, The role of the family in the process of migration, in C. G. Pooley and I. D. Whyte, eds, Migrants, emigrants and immigrants: a social history of migration (Oxford 1991), 106-142.

As Professor Emeritus I am no longer allowed to supervise PhD students

I no longer teach at Leicester.

Social structure demography genealogy and DNA.