Jan Kok and Angélique Janssens
From January 1st, 2017, The History of the Family. An International Quarterly will be edited by Jan Kok and Angélique Janssens, who replaces Hilde Bras as co-editor-in-chief. Hilde Bras has served the journal for the past four years for which we are very grateful. Her editorship has strengthened the position of our journal, among others she has supervised many special issues. Hilde has decided to shift her attention to the field of sociology of consumption and household, in which she holds a chair at Wageningen University. We are glad that she joins our editorial board. We wish her great success in her future career.
Angélique Janssens is endowed professor of Historical Demography at Maastricht University and associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her doctoral dissertation Family and Social Change. The household as a process in an industrializing community was published in the famous Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy, and Society in Past Time in 1993. Since then, she has produced a number of edited volumes on, for instance, the breadwinner family system and the role of women in the fertility decline. Her most recent monograph is Labouring Lives. Women, work and the demographic transition in the Netherlands, 1880-1960 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). Currently, she is directing a large research project titled: Genes, Germs and Resources. The role of the family and the disease environment in mortality and longevity in the Netherlands, 1812-2015. She is also the scientific director of the N.W. Posthumus Institute, the Dutch-Flemish graduate school for social and economic history.
The new editorial team remains strongly dedicated to the vision of The History of the Family’s founding editors, Tamara Hareven and Andrejs Plakans. We remain strongly committed to interdisciplinary research and hence we warmly welcome articles on historical anthropology, historical sociology, economic history, demography, and psychology as they relate to the history of the family and the life course. In this and next year’s volumes, our readers may expect interesting special issues on topics such as the influence of family composition on height, the treatment of refugee families in Australia’s past, and the impact of family crises.
As always, we encourage people with ideas for special issues to contact us. Of course, there will always be room for research articles by individual authors. In addition, there is the option to publish a brief ‘research note’ on new sources for family and life course history research (e.g. large databases, special websites, social surveys and digitized (auto)biographical material or newspapers). A research note may also discuss new (statistical) methods for analysis or new research practices, such as collaborative international research groups.
In the coming years, we particularly welcome contributions dealing with the demography of colonized populations, a burgeoning field of research. This includes critical reflection of sources and methods to deal with imperfect historical data. We also encourage single contributions or special issues on topics related to health and disease, such as the lasting impact of early-life conditions, or the relative impact of genetic and socio-economic factors in the transmission of diseases or longevity. In terms of geographic coverage, we encourage researchers from Central and Latin America, Africa and South Asia to submit their work to the Quarterly. Likewise, we invite scholars working on Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern history to expand the chronological scope of our journal.
Finally, we want to thank all anonymous reviewers who have spent their valuable time and energy to evaluate the scientific quality of manuscripts and to suggest modifications that often prove extremely helpful. They are and will always be the true backbone of the Quarterly.