Emily Chung

Power Fellow, 2026/27London School of Economics

Emily Chung is an urban economic historian of modern Britain. Her PhD (Cambridge) examined urban development and residential reform in Manchester from 1840-1900. Using census data, cartographic material, and trade directories, the project reconstructed the residential distribution of the city at a highly granular scale, and drew on this database alongside local medical reports and social investigations to connect changes in the urban fabric to developments in local administration and national legislation. Her research has overturned some of the traditional narratives about segregation in Victorian Manchester and proposes new ways to study industrial cities’ social and economic histories using spatial and demographic data. As Power Fellow (2026-7) at the London School of Economics, Emily will expand her scope of study to produce geodemographic reconstructions of two other British industrial cities — Birmingham and Glasgow — to further question the paradigms of demographic growth and urban social formations through both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison.