| My most important contributions to historical research so far come in the study of childhood. When I began in the late 1970s historians still largely ignored the area. Since then it has taken off in various countries, in line with the general trend to investigate groups marginalized by traditional historiography such as women, the unemployed and immigrants. My first project in this field was a study of child labour, apprenticeship and education in nineteenth-century France (1988). I consolidated my position in the field with a book on the history of childhood in Europe and North America from the medieval to the modern period (2001). Here I considered ideas on childhood down the ages, examined children through their various stages of life, and looked at their work, health and education. This work has been translated into a number of foreign languages. I have also recently completed a monograph, Growing Up in Modern France (2007), based on letters, diaries and above all autobiographical material. In this I analyse topics such as the social constructions of childhood and adolescence in modern France, the phases of growing up, relations with parents and peers, schooling and sexuality. Besides childhood, I have pursued researches into the economic, social, cultural and political life of the French town of Troyes during the nineteenth century. In the late 1980s and 1990s I extended and up-dated earlier researches, with many archive visits to the town and to Paris. Since then I have spent time constructing a database of households in the town, and started to publish my findings in learned journals. I am at present writing a book-length study on the growth of democratic politics in the town. Expertise gathered on this project has led to various general surveys of French and European economic and social history in influential series. Forthcoming publications and work in progress: ‘The Historiography of Child Labour’ and ‘France: An Overview’, in Child Labor World Atlas, ed. Hugh Hindman (Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 2008). A History of Childhood and Youth in Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for their New Approaches to History series Editor of A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Berg, 2008). Currently completing a monograph provisionally entitled Democratization in Nineteenth-Century France: The Case of Troyes and the Department of the Aube. | 
