Normally, the Local Population Studies Society (LPSS) arranges two conferences a year in different locations across the country. They cover a variety of themes relevant to population and social history, with speakers interested in local, national and international history.
Details of a few of our other recent conferences are below.
LPSS Spring Conference, 2023: Non-conformist Local Population History.
- 10.00-10.30 – Registration and coffee
- 10.30 – Online conference opens
- 10.30-10.40 – Welcome
- 10.40-11.25 – Frances Richardson University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, Missing from parish records: assessing the importance of non-conformist baptisms for the study of adult male occupations in early nineteenth-century Wales
- 11.25-12.10 – Philip Thornborow Former Liaison Officer for Methodist Archives, ‘In a class of their own? Available sources for the study of members of the Methodist movement’
- 12.10-12.55 – Christine Jones Library Volunteer, John Wesley’s New Room, The Membership Books of the New Room 1770 to 1786: a source for the study of a local non-conformist population
- 13.00-14.30 – LUNCH BREAK and (optional) visit to New Room Museum
- 14.30-15.15 – Andy Fincham University of Birmingham, Opening cans of worms for sleeping dogs: a case study on collating early modern archives in pursuit of data.
- 15.15-16.00 – Marcus Bateman Doctoral student, University of Oxford, Living in a Covenant Community – Baptists in Woolverstone and Ipswich (Suffolk) 1758-1851
- 16.00-16.15 – Concluding remarks.
Spring Workshop and AGM 2022
Autumn conference 2021: The British Diaspora
The 2021 autumn conference was held on Zoom on Saturday 9 October, with five exciting papers looking at networks and migrations. The full programme is available below.
Wider still and wider… Local Population Studies in England and continental Europe
The 2021 spring conference was organised alongside the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and took place on Zoom on the afternoon of Saturday 17 April. We were pleased to be showcasing the work being done on local population history by postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. You can find the programme here
Paths to marriage: courtship in England and Wales
Our Autumn conference, at Rewley House Oxford, in November, covered marriage and courtship from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Topics included regional courtship practices, romance, interracial marriage and migration for marriage. You can see the full programme here.
“Let’s talk of graves”
The 2019 annual conference ‘Let’s talk of graves’: Mortality and graveyards, c.1700-c.1950, held at the Wilson Carlisle Centre in Sheffield in April 2019 included papers on urban mortality, funerary practices, disease, and exhumation, and much more. You can see the full programme here.
Historical sources and their use in local population studies
The Autumn 2018 conference, held at Rewley House in Oxford, included papers on apprenticeship and legal records, maps, and population lists, from new and established scholars. The programme is available here.
Historical demography, the local dimension — retrospect and prospect
Cambridge University, Department of Geography, Saturday 21 April 2018. The conference was sponsored by the Local Population Study Society and the Centre for the History of Population and Social Structure at the University of Cambridge (CAMPOP). The conference included presentations giving an overview of population history, a panel discussion about how non-academic historians became involved in the subject, and the launch of CAMPOP’s new website, populationspast.org.
A selection of articles on this topic, including some which were presented at the conference, were published in Local Population Studies 100.
Population and Transport
University of Leicester, Saturday 11 November 2017. This conference was sponsored by the Local Population Studies Society and the Friends of the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester, and included historians working on the link between transport, in various forms, and population, including national overviews and local case studies.
The New Poor Law
University of Winchester, Saturday 22 April 2017. This conference was sponsored by the Local Population Studies Society, the Wessex Centre for History & Archaeology, and the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. It brought together several historians who have worked on aspects of the New Poor Law during the past two decades with the aim of assessing our knowledge of its operation and impact.
A selection of articles on this topic, including some which were presented at the conference, were published in Local Population Studies 99.
Perspectives on Old Age and Ageing
St Mary’s College, University of Durham, Saturday 12 November 2016. This conference was sponsored by the Local Population Studies Society and the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. It presented new insights into the varied experience of ageing in Britain from medieval to modern times. A detailed programme is available here.