Keynote speakers
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk is a professor of economic and social history and chair of the Economic and Social History group at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She specializes in Global Labour History, with a focus on gendered and colonial labour relations. Apart from journal articles in Feminist Economics, Economic History Review, and the European Review of Economic History, Elise published a monograph entitled Women, Work and Colonialism in the Netherlands and Java. She was PI of the EU-funded ERC Consolidator research project “Race to the Bottom? Family Labour, Household Livelihood and Consumption in the Relocation of Global Cotton Manufacturing, ca. 1750-1990”. Currently, Elise is developing a new research project on coerced labour in the Dutch Empire.
Mar Rubio-Varas is a Professor of History and Economic Institutions at Universidad Publica de Navarra (UPNA, Spain). She specializes in the long-term relationships between energy consumption and the economy, focusing on energy dependency and transitions to low-carbon economies. She holds a PhD and Master’s from the London School of Economics and a degree in Economics from Carlos III University. Rubio-Varas leads a team researching the take-off of renewable industry in Navarra and other European regions and her research includes directing multiple EU-funded projects. Among her publications is a book on the Spanish nuclear sector (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
César A. Hidalgo is known for his contributions to economic complexity and for his applied work on data visualization and artificial intelligence. Hidalgo is a tenured professor at the Toulouse School of Economics’ Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the head of the Center for Collective Learning. Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. He has authored dozens of peer-reviewed papers and three books: Why Information Grows, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, and How Humans Judge Machines.