Evan Roberts

Lecturer

BSc, BA (Hons) (Victoria University)
MA, PhD, Minnesota

Contact details

Lectures in

HIST 117: Empires and Peoples
HIST 120: Making History
HIST 234: Special Topic: Tired, Poor and Huddled Masses: American Social History, 1860-1924
HIST 317: New Zealand History
HIST 318: Comparative History of New Zealand and the United States
HIST 404: A Topic in the History of the United States

Research Areas

• Modern United States history
• New Zealand history
• Demographic and economic history
• Social history
• Business history

Current Research

Evan's current research looks at labour force participation and women's employment in the United States since the Civil War. His doctoral work looked at how family decisions about married women's labour force participation changed before World War II, and changes in public opinion about married women working.

With support from the Health Research Council and the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden fund he is working on measuring the past two centuries of New Zealand living standards. Height and weight will be the main measures of living standards.  This work is joint with Kris Inwood (Guelph) and Les Oxley (Canterbury).  

He is active in international projects to develop public-use datasets of historical census data. In particular, he is interested in the development and application of occupational classification systems for historical data.

He continues to work on the comparative history of department stores in New Zealand and the United States, which he began in his Honours year at Victoria University.

Recent Publications

• Lisa Dillon and Evan Roberts (2006) “Introduction: History & Computing Special Issue on Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Historical Data: Intersections and Opportunities.” History & Computing 14(1/2): 1-8.
• Guest editor for History & Computing 14(1/2) with Lisa Y. Dillon.
• Evan Roberts (2003) “‘Don’t Sell Things, Sell Effects’: Overseas influences in New Zealand department stores, 1909-1956.” Business History Review 77 (Summer): 265-89.
• Evan Roberts, Steven Ruggles, Lisa Dillon, Ólöf Garðarsðottir, Jan Oldervoll, Gunnar Thorvaldsen and Matthew Woollard (2002) “The North Atlantic Population Project: An Overview.” Historical Methods 36(2, Part
  2): 80-88.
• Evan Roberts, Matthew Woollard, Chad Ronnander, Lisa Dillon, and Gunnar Thorvaldsen (2002) “Occupational Classification in the North Atlantic Population Project.” Historical Methods 36(2, Part 2): 89-96.
• Evan Roberts (2002) “Gender in Store: The Politics of Salespeople’s Working Hours, and Retail Unions in New Zealand and the United States, 1930-1960.” Labour History (83): 107-30.

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