Dr. Rebecca Simson is a Research Associate in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, where she is Principal Investigator of Africa's Long Depression 1975–2000, an ESRC-funded project. Her research sits at the intersection of economic history, development economics, and African studies, and she writes on topics including public finance and employment, macroeconomic policy, inequality, elite formation, and higher education in postcolonial East and West Africa.

She holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics, where she also completed her MSc. Before returning to academia, she spent nearly a decade working in international development with organisations including the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute, and the International Growth Centre, in Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan.

Her work has been published in journals including the Economic History Review, Explorations in Economic History, the Journal of Development Economics, and African Affairs, and has received the David and Helen Kimble Prize for best article in the Journal of Modern African Studies. She is also an editor of the Frontiers in African Economic History blog and writes regularly for broader audiences on African economic history and development.

Rebecca teaches on both undergraduate and graduate programmes in history and economic history. Her graduate teaching includes courses on African economic history, global economic history, methods and approaches, and she supervises dissertations at MSc and MPhil level. She has previously taught at LSE, the African School of Economics in Benin, and the LSE–UCT summer school.