Senior lecturer and associate professor of history, from 2027 director of the research infrastructure SwedPop. My field is historical and contemporary demography, focusing on long-term family change
My primary field of research is historical and contemporary demography. I am based at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University. I am currently also an affiliated researcher at the Demography Unit (SUDA), Department of Sociology, Stockholm University.
My research centres on the forces behind the long-term changes in family dynamics and living conditions in Sweden and the rest of the Western world from the late nineteenth century to the present day. More specifically, my work has addressed the development of family formation and fertility, divorce and household composition in Sweden and other countries, primarily in Europe.
Since 2024 I have also been part of the project Partnership formation and fertility decline in times of global uncertainties at Stockholm University, funded by FORTE. The project examines the causes behind the sharp decline in birth rates in Sweden and several other Western countries since 2010. A project description is available here.
From January 2027 I am director of SwedPop, a national research infrastructure funded by the Swedish Research Council, which brings together the most important Swedish historical population databases and makes them available for research. The infrastructure is run by a consortium hosted by Umeå University, together with Lund University, University of Gothenburg, the Swedish National Archives and the Stockholm City Archives, and in collaboration with the Federation of Swedish Genealogical Societies.
SwedPop holds life-course data for more than 3.5 million individuals from 1700 to 1968, the full-count national censuses, and records of every death in Sweden since 1815. During 2027–2030 the infrastructure is being expanded towards national coverage: causes of death, marriages, births and school records are being transcribed using machine learning. In parallel, principles are being developed for a stable historical personal identifier, which in the longer term will form the basis for a national historical population register that can be linked to present-day Swedish registers.
More information about the project, and access to download data, is available at swedpop.se.
Research areas: History, Demography, Population, Family, Divorce, Marriage, Childbearing, Fertility, Households, Living alone