Job description

Hilde L. Sommerseth is a professor of historical demography at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), and she is the head of the Historical Population Data Lab (HistLab), formerly known as the Norwegian Historical Data Centre (NHDC).

Sommerseth has decades of experience working with microdata from Norway's historical population censuses and church books and has been a partner in the construction of the Norwegian Historical Population Register (HPR) since 2015. This register enables researchers to follow individuals who resided in Norway between 1801 and 1964, their life course history nested within and across generations.  

In collaboration with partners at the National Archives of Norway, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Statistics Norway, the Norwegian Computing Center, the National Library, and the Norwegian School of Economics, Sommerseth and her HistLab team develop automatic record linkage routines and format the HPR data for use by the international research community. This work also involves creating a public platform for the dissemination of the register, along with interactive tools for analysis.

Sommerseth’s research centres on historical demography, with a focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intergenerational studies are the nucleus of her interest, stretching from studies on mortality to research on household composition. Key subjects are causes of death, gendering of diseases, human capital, social inequality in health, ethnicity, masculinity, and ageing.

Sommerseth is one of the executive editors of Historical Methods, A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. She is a member of several international advisory boards related to population registers, such as Link Lives, the historical sample of the Netherlands, and Britain's first demographic transition: an integrated geography. She is currently also a board member of the European Society of Historical Demography, the steering committee of SHiP+ “Studying the history of Health in (Port) cities”, and a member of the editorial board of the Norwegian medical journal Michael.

Of externally funded projects, she is currently the PI of a FRIPRO-funded project ‘Persistence or change? – Lessons from the introduction of the enhetsskolen in Denmark and Norway (2023-2027), and partner in the infrastructure Historical Registers (2022-2029).