Xuesheng You joined the Economics Department in November 2019. He received a PhD in Economic History from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. Prior to that, he received an MPhil in Economics (research) from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor of Economic Science from the University of Manchester.
Before joining Swansea, he worked at the world-renowned Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge between 2014 and 2019. While there, he was involved in a number of major research projects funded by the ESRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, and National Science Foundation. These research projects, pertaining to the occupational structure, transport network, and urbanization of historical Britain, continue to transform our understanding of the long-run British economic development.
His main research interests lie in the field of gender, family, labour, transport and urbanization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. His research uses c.160 million individual census records and locations of all historical transport modes in Britain.