Dr T.G.M.W. Riswick (Tim)

Assistant professor - Economical, Social and Demographic History

Contact

tim.riswick@ru.nl

Postal address

Postbus 9103
6500 HD NIJMEGEN

Working days Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

Tim Riswick is an Assistant Professor of Historical Demography at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He leads the COST Action network “The Great Leap: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Health Inequalities, 1800-2022”, the Dutch platform www.doodsoorzaken.nl, and is currently working on his Dutch Research Council Veni project, “Unravelling Health Inequalities: The Historical Roots of Inequality in Death and Disease in West-European Port Cities, 1850-1950.”

As researcher his expertise lies in comparative family history in East Asia and Western Europe from 1800 to 2000. His work examines the emergence of health inequalities in 19th and 20th-century societies, focusing on epidemics, cause-specific mortality, and hospital patients.

He teaches about global family history, historical demography, historical life courses, and life stories. He also contributes to interdisciplinary teaching modules, including the new master Health Care Humanities.

Lastly, he actively contributes to the field of historical demography through various roles: he is a board member of the European Society of Historical Demography, a co-Editor-in-Chief of The History of the Family, and Chair of the IUSSP Panel on Epidemics and Contagious Diseases. Additionally, he is a member of the Radboud Young Academy and is board member of Museum de Kantfabriek.

Tags: historical demography, inequality, family history

Research theme

Historical Demography

Research group

Radboud Group For Historical Demography and Family History

Publications

Projects

2025 - 2028 'Unravelling Health Inequalities: The Historical Roots of Inequality in Death and Disease in West-European Port Cities, 1850-1950' - Today’s health inequalities have deep historical roots that are not fully understood. My project adopts an innovative comparative approach to the study of determinants of health inequalities in the port cities Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Glasgow in the period 1850-1950. The analysis of unique individual-level data on diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, and cholera will provide new knowledge on the causes of inequalities in health. It will enable the study of how and why health disparities emerged. By shedding light on the past, it will offer new insights into why some health inequalities persist today.
2023 - 2027 COST-Action 'The Great Leap. Multidisciplinary approaches to health inequalities, 1800-2022': To this day and age, deep-routed, structural inequalities in health have been one of the most consistent and pressing challenges society has faced. Embracing the COST Mission, the Great Leap takes a unique, multidisciplinary approach from a historical perspective to gain a greater understanding of the roots and drivers of health inequalities across regions and countries in Europe and beyond. To achieve this mission, the Great Leap creates an international, multidisciplinary network that will bundle expertise, techniques, insights and data to create (1) the first international comparable dataset of individual-level historical cause of death data, (2) innovative analytical tools to analyse it, and (3) insights into how this information can be used in current public health policy and practice. More information
2020 - 2025 Lifting the burden of disease. The modernization of health in the Netherlands: Amsterdam 1854-1940: The project proposes a multi-perspective approach to these individual-level data, combining 1) a historical-epidemiological approach, 2) a life-course analysis of victims and survivors, and 3) a spatial analysis of death and disease at the city level. This novel micro-level approach promises to make an important breakthrough in the current academic debate on the determinants of the great leaps in life expectancy before the 1940s. This project, based on data for the city of Amsterdam between 1854-1940, will reveal the successes of the fight against infectious diseases, but also what remained of this burden before the start of the mass vaccination programme. More information
2024 - 2025 In Nederlandse archieven liggen nog talloze onontdekte documenten die belangrijk zijn voor het begrijpen van de geschiedenis van ziekten en epidemieën. Doodsoorzaken.nl bouwt voort op de eerdere successen van de projecten “SOS Antwerpen” en “Dood in Amsterdam”, waar een team enthousiaste vrijwilligers duizenden doodsoorzaken vastlegde en zo toegankelijk maakte voor onderzoek. Het project Doodsoorzaken heeft als doel om van de in Nederland voor diverse andere gemeenten nog bewaard gebleven doodsoorzakenbronnen uit de negentiende en begin twintigste eeuw datasets te creëren. Het gaat in ieder geval om een tiental grote steden, zoals Leeuwarden, Nijmegen, Zwolle, Haarlem en Groningen. More information

Dr T.G.M.W. Riswick (Tim)

Publications

Projects

Teaching

Curriculum Vitae

Ancillary activities