Joan Robinson

Joan Robinson
Robinson in the 1920s
Born	Joan Violet Maurice (1903-10-31)31 October 1903 Surrey, England
Died	5 August 1983(1983-08-05) (aged 79) Cambridge
Nationality	British
Field	Monetary economics
School or tradition	Post-Keynesian economics
Influences	John Maynard Keynes, Piero Sraffa, Michał Kalecki
Influenced	Athanasios Asimakopulos Alfred S. Eichner Nicholas Kaldor Robin Hahnel Yanis Varoufakis
Contributions	Joan Robinson's growth model Amoroso–Robinson relation

Joan Violet Robinson FBA (31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983), previously Joan Violet Maurice, was a British economist well known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory.

She was the daughter of Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, 1st Baronet, and was married to Austin Robinson, a fellow economist. Together, they had two children.

Before leaving to fight in the Second Boer War, Joan Maurice's father married Margaret Helen Marsh, the daughter of Frederick Howard Marsh, and the sister of Edward Marsh, at St George's, Hanover Square. Joan Maurice was born in 1903, a year after her father's return from Africa.

She studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge, and while there came under the influence of Maurice Dobb, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. "Dobb was probably the first academic in Britain to carry a Communist Party membership card. Without Dobb, communism would never have gained the prominence in Cambridge that it did." However, by no means all of his students agreed with his political views. A group of "hearties" seized him and threw him "fully dressed into the River Cam", in a futile effort to teach him sense. This happened to Dobb more than once; but his persecutors became bored and eventually left him alone.

Immediately after graduation in 1925, she married the economist Austin Robinson. In 1937, she became a lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge. She joined the British Academy in 1958 and was elected a fellow of Newnham College in 1962. In 1965 she assumed the position of full professor and fellow of Girton College. In 1979, just four years before she died, she became the first female honorary fellow of King's College.