Evan Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Population Studies programs at the University of Minnesota. His research interests are at the intersection of historical demography and the social determinants of health and mortality. He received his undergraduate degrees from Victoria University of Wellington, and a PhD (2007) in History from the University of Minnesota. Roberts taught in Sociology before joining the Medical School in 2022. His recent work has been published in a wide range of journals including Demography, Explorations in Economic History, History of the Family, Social Science and Medicine, and the Journal of Economic History. He currently serves on the editorial boards of History of the Family, and the Journal of Health Services Research and Policy.

What led you to apply to the Fesler-Lampert Chair?

I applied for the Fesler-Lampert chair as my research interests have evolved to center aging as part of the theoretical puzzle of understanding both veteran suicide and broader life expectancy impacts of military service. Many studies of how veterans are affected by the war follow people for several decades, but rarely all the way through life. A lot of work by historians on veterans has focused on the immediate few years after the war. My demographic work with historical (World War I and II) subjects suggests that the effects of the war might echo quite late into men’s lives. Participating in the CHAI Special Interest Group on Resilience has opened up new strands of literature for me to consider, and helped me think about the work theoretically.

What are some of the projects you plan to work on while F-L Chair? What do you hope to achieve?

During my Fesler-Lampert Chair year, I will be completing a series of case control studies of veterans from the two world wars, taking two different approaches to understand how military experiences affects men’s lives. The first set of studies examines prisoners of war from both New Zealand and the United States, and uses brothers and military peers as control subjects to measure how being a prisoner of war affected life expectancy. Beyond the intrinsic interest of what happens when people are imprisoned, the event of becoming a prisoner is often somewhat random from the soldier’s perspective. Natural experiments like this are really valuable (and a little rare!) in historical settings, and also mental health more broadly. The second set of studies examines veterans who died by suicide after serving in either World War I or II in the New Zealand military forces. New Zealand has distinctively valuable records for studying suicide in the past, as it retains all of the coronial inquiries ever conducted. Most countries, states, or provinces in English-speaking countries have thrown these out after a decade or two (The only two other places that have records like these are British Columbia and Québec). These coronial inquiries allow me to comprehensively identify veterans who died by suicide after wartime service, and re-examine the original testimony and evidence. Together with research assistants, I will complete a family-based case-control study of what factors increased the chance of later suicide, and how suicide affected life expectancy.

What are some of your professional and academic goals after the Chair ends?

The Fesler-Lampert chair is so well timed. I will also be at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study in Spring 2026, which will allow me the time to complete a couple of chapters on my book manuscript. The work supported by the Fesler-Lampert Chair award will support a chapter in the book I am writing, Such a Rash Act, about veteran suicide after the two world wars. I plan to work with the graduate research assistant to draft an article on the prisoners of war analyses. My book is due to the publisher, McGill-Queens University Press at the end of 2027.