Robert Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British history. His main interests lie in social and cultural history, particularly urban history, gender history, and the history of crime, justice and punishment, and in the use of digital technologies in historical research. He has written books and articles on petty crime, gender, violence and disorder, and has recently focused on print and attitudes to crime, and on the interactions between plebeian lives and social policy in eighteenth-century London.

He is co-director of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (with Tim Hitchcock and Clive Emsley), which created a fully searchable edition of the entire run of published accounts of trials which took place at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913, and London Lives, 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis (with Tim Hitchcock), a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscript records and fifteen datasets which makes it possible to compile biographies of eighteenth-century Londoners. He has directed a number of further digital history/humanities projects building on these, including Locating London’s Past and Connected Histories.

Research: eighteenth-century crime, justice and punishment, gender, urban history, print culture, and the digital humanities.