Joan Robinson was one of the twentieth century’s greatest economists. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that ‘Joan Robinson more than any other economist of the twentieth century became a model for progressive radicals’, not least because of her fierce attacks on neoclassical economic theories that posited smoothly-functioning markets. She completed her undergraduate studies at Girton College in 1925, and after a break to raise a family she was appointed to an assistant lectureship in economics and politics at Cambridge in 1934, and became a university lecturer in 1937, reader in 1949, and professor of economics in 1965. She played a considerable role in helping J. M. Keynes formulate his revolutionary General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), and also did a great deal to incorporate Marxist insights into economic theory. Her magnum opus was The Accumulation of Capital (1956), which was a major work in what became known as post-Keynesian economics. She joined the British Academy in 1958. In 1979 she became the first female honorary fellow of King’s College.
