Victoria Gierok is an economic historian of pre-industrial Europe, with particular interests in inequality, state formation, and fiscal institutions in the Holy Roman Empire and the wider German-speaking world. She completed her DPhil in Economic and Social History at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, in 2022. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Thirsk-Feinstein PhD Dissertation Prize by the Economic History Society and was shortlisted for the Gerschenkron Prize by the Economic History Association. Between 2022 and 2025 she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Economics and Nuffield College in Oxford.

Gierok’s research combines archival work with the quantitative methods of economic history. Her published work, which has appeared in the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History, has reconstructed the long-run development of wealth inequality and poverty in the German territories from the late Middle Ages to the eve of industrialisation, and traced the urban consequences of the Thirty Years’ War.

As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Gierok will pursue a project on State Formation, Inequality and Growth in Early Modern Europe. The project reexamines the rise of the early modern fiscal-military state from the bottom up, asking how local institutions and private contractors – mercenary entrepreneurs, tax farmers, chartered companies – built administrative and fiscal capacity that central states would later absorb. Drawing on new comparative data from Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire it asks how different pathways of state formation shaped inequality and political stability.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.